Daisy wheel printing
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Daisy wheel printing is an
By 1980 daisy wheel printers had become the dominant technology for high-quality text printing, grossly impacting the dominance of manual and electric typewriters, and forcing dominant companies in that industry, including Brother and Silver Seiko to rapidly adapt — and new companies, e.g., Canon and Xerox, to enter the personal and office market for daisy wheel typewriters. The personal and office printing industry would soon adapt again to the advent of the PC and word processing software.
History
In 1889 Arthur Irving Jacobs patented a daisy wheel design (U.S. Patent 409,289) that was used on the Victor index typewriter.
A. H. Reiber of Teletype Corporation received U.S. Patent 2,146,380 in 1939 for a daisy wheel printer.
In 1970 a team at Diablo Systems led by engineer Dr Andrew Gabor developed the first commercially successful daisy wheel printer, a device that was faster and more flexible than IBM's
Xerox acquired Diablo that same year. Xerox's Office Product Division had already been buying Diablo printers for its
The Diablo 630 was so successful that virtually all later daisy wheel printers, as well as many dot matrix printers and even the original
Xerox later adapted Diablo's daisy wheel technology into a typewriter that sold for less than $50.[citation needed] An automated factory was built near Dallas that took less than 30 minutes to assemble a Xerox typewriter. The Xerox typewriter was well received but never achieved the projected sales numbers due to the advent of the PC and word processing software. The typewriter was later modified to be compatible with PCs but the engineering which made it a low cost device reduced its flexibility.[3] By the mid-1980s daisy wheel technology was rapidly becoming obsolete due to the growing spread of affordable laser and inkjet machines, and daisy wheel machines soon disappeared except for the small remaining typewriter market.
Design
The heart of the system is an interchangeable metal or plastic "daisy wheel" holding an entire character set as raised characters moulded on each "petal". In use a
Different typefaces and sizes can be used by replacing the daisy wheel. It is possible to use multiple fonts within a document: font changing is facilitated by printer device drivers which can position the carriage to the center of the platen and prompt the user to change the wheel before continuing printing. However, printing a document with frequent font changes requiring frequent wheel changes quickly became tedious.
Many daisy wheel machines offer a bold type facility, accomplished by double- or triple-striking the specified character(s); servo-based printers advance the carriage fractionally for a wider (and therefore blacker) character, while cheaper machines perform a carriage return without a line feed to return to the beginning of the line, space through all non-bold text, and restrike each bolded character. The inherent imprecision in attempting to restrike on exactly the same spot after a carriage return provides the same effect as the more expensive servo-based printers, with the unique side effect that as the printer ages and wears, bold text becomes bolder.
Like all other impact printers, daisy wheel printers are noisy.
Bi-directional printing
Most daisy-wheel printers could print a line and then, using built-in memory, print the following line backwards, from right to left. This saved the time that otherwise would have been needed to return the print head to its starting point. This was sometimes known as 'logic seeking,' and was a feature on some dot-matrix printers as well.
Graphics
Although the daisy wheel principle is basically inappropriate for printing
Daisy wheel printers are capable of producing simplified graphics in the form of ASCII art.
Consideration was also given to optimising graphic printing by changing the glyphs on the daisy wheel to a set that would be able to print all the required bitmap combinations more quickly, without requiring an impact for every single dot. This would have the advantage that vertical dot combinations could be printed in a single impact, without requiring fine rotation control of the platen roller. However it would require a specialised daisy wheel so printing of a letter and letterhead would require a two-step process with a manual wheel change in-between.
Brother Industries manufactured the Twinriter 5 (1985) and 6 (1987) printers which tried to overcome the limitation of the missing graphics capabilities of daisy wheel printers by adding a dot matrix print head to the existing daisy wheel print head, with the former being used for letter quality printing and the latter for drafts and for printing symbols which were not present in the daisy wheel character set.[6][7][8]
Variants
Thimble printers are closely related to daisy wheel printers, but instead of a flat wheel the petals were bent to form a cup-shaped "thimble" print element. Introduced by NEC in 1977 as their "Spinwriter" series, the replaceable thimbles each held 128 characters.[9][10]
See also
References
- ^ Comstock, George E. (2003-08-13). "Oral History of George Comstock" (PDF). Interviewed by Hendrie, Gardner. Mountain View, California, USA: Computer History Museum. CHM X2727.2004. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-03-23. Retrieved 2017-03-23.
- ^ "Merriam Webster On-line".
- ISBN 978-1-4276-3270-8.
- ^ Hogan, Thom (March 1984). "Creating a letterhead with your daisywheel printer". Creative Computing Magazine. 10 (3): 202.
- ISSN 0098-3063.
- Creative Computing. 11 (11): 72. Archivedfrom the original on 2016-10-31. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
- ^ King, Steve (1987-11-23). "Brother Twinriter 6 - Daisy Wheel Drives Us Dotty - A Little Slowly - Dual-Format Printer Saves Spaces, Sacrifies Draft Print Quality". InfoWorld: 57–60. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
- ^ Shannon, L. R. (1987-08-25). "Peripherals; Finally, the Right Stuff". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2016-10-31. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
- ^ Cromemco 3355A Printer Operator's Guide (PDF). Cromemco, Inc. March 1980. (Rebadged Model 550 Series Spinwriter)
- ^ "NEC Printer Model Information". Retrieved 18 February 2009.