Part of my job is helping a local POS supplier with support, and we still use a descendant of this printer for kitchens. Kitchens get hot, you leave a ticket in the wrong spot and if it's thermal it'll just turn black. Dot matrix is far from dead.
Yep, local plumbing supply store still uses Dot matrix for carbon copy receipts. They actually just bought a couple 16 pins brand new a year ago. They still look exactly like they did in 1998 lol.
Reminds me of the time when I worked as a cashier. I figured out how to mess with the settings of the thermal printers and noticed that if I put the printer on the slowest setting the receipts would be much more legible and immune to fading. Surprisingly, it didn't print that much slower and it also was quite a bit quieter, so I slowly changed all the registers to use the slower print setting. Nobody noticed but I def felt way more prouder than I should've been haha
Gawd. Every department store, grocery store, you name it, had printers that sounded like these up until at least the late 2000's early 2010s. Hearing that printer sound brings me back to shopping with my mom and being in checkout lanes as a kid.
I remember those large grey noisy recipient printers at banks,department stores, grocery stores and restaurants in the late 80s and early 90s. Love the sound of them along with the sound PC harddrives made in the 80s and 90s.
Oh yes, now that you mention it, I remember the sound of turning on my Philips P3302 (if I recall the model number correctly), a 80286 at 16MHz. It had an oversized red toggle switch at the right back corner, so you got that satisfying "kachunk" sound. Then you'd hear the harddrive spinning up, which took a while, it was so large it took up 2 5¼" bays. I think it had about 20MB of storage capacity. Of course it wasn't an IDE drive either, those came later. It connected with two differently sized ribbon cables to the ISA expansion card that was the hard drive controller. I think it was called a Winchester interface. Good memories :)
I remember them too (especially at stores in my town that had older equipment, like Sears, since I didn't even grow up as far back as the 90s), and they kinda still have them today at both the movie theaters in my town to print tickets, but it just seems to be the noise that carried over because those ones are all newer (probably thermal).
I worked at CVS in the early 2000s during the time they transitioned to thermal receipt printers. Before the switch, they had just introduced bar-coded receipts (to facilitate returns), and the infamous bar-coded ExtraCare coupons. Printing time, noise, and appetite for ink ribbons skyrocketed.
I use to work in retail. The printer power cable was hard to remove because it has a latching mechanism yiu need to pull the latching mechanism backwards before you can remove the power cable. Also you actually don't need a special driver for most of these text based printers as windows has a built in text only driver that works fine with many models of text printers.
When I worked at Citizens Bank in the early 2010s, there were a surprising number of people who still hung on to those passbook savings accounts. They were always getting messed up because it was possible to do transactions without the book. Moms would come in to re-sync offline transactions to the ledger for their kids' college accounts they were raiding, and little old ladies would come in to get the earned interest printed every month.
My mum kept her passbook until the bank forced her to stop by simply no longer providing the books. That was late 2000s in Australia. I remember the transaction receipts, the white and yellow copies. This is bringing up memories of waiting FOREVER in line at the bank, the absolute boredom. Except the nostalgia is just making this video even better
I still have one of those, lol. (and I'm only 23, so I didn't know that these types of saving accounts were that common back in the days. Though then again, I don't know how it was here in Germany) But it normally isn't possible to make a transaction without the book.
@@DeGandalf It wasn't supposed to be possible to do transactions without the book at first, but there was a period of time (when online banking was new) where customers realized they could move money to/from passbook accounts. Eventually when the bank discovered the oversight, they added the opttion for this and in branch transactions to be performed and stored for later update/sync to the paper book.
I worked for Citizens from 1994 to 2019…. The passbooks were originally printed on IBM 4720 printers that allowed for passbooks to pass through from the front to the top of the printer. That printer also had a journal roll in the back that is exactly as the yellow paper in this video (just wider and white in color). All transactions would be recorded on it. We then moved to the Wincor document printer that had a pass through from front to back. They were bulletproof. For receipts we went to a dual color ink jet based Epson printer. It was awful as it blew through the ink.
i wish passbooks were still available here. they seem much more convenient for how i conduct my financial activities, and i like the aspect of having the possibility to have your transaction on a physical document and not having to print out a tiny receipt from the ATM or logging in to on-line/mobile banking
ESC/POS is the printer language the machine uses. Any driver that speaks that should work with it. UNIX systems running CUPS have robust receipt printer support for some reason. Might be worth trying it on that. At the end of the day though, most Windows applications don't even use a driver with these. They do the DOS method of just formatting the print jobs themselves and sending the print jobs raw to the receipt printer instead.
Here in the Philippines, dot-matrix receipt printers are still commonly used (particularly the Epson TM-U220 series) due to tax laws enacted in 2015 prohibiting the use of thermal paper because of concerns about receipts fading. But large retailers here still use thermal printers, provided that they issue handwritten receipts upon request.
The carbon copy wasn't the only method of duplicating receipts. I've seen tills with printers that are much wider than the customer receipt, and they print the information twice - once on the customer copy, once on a second roll that is kept inside the till for store records.
Sainsbury's shops in the UK used this type of printer. I can still hear the sound of the printer printing two receipts per pass in my mind's ear even now. You could tell from the sound that the 'internal' reel had more information printed per line than the customer copy.
@@timf-tinkering I used to repair these, they were the ICL later Fujitsu/ICL Teampos printers. Absolutely solid printers! Sainsburys moved to the Epson TM-H6000II and later onto NCR RealPOS. Epson's equivalent was the TM-950.
Waitrose and TK Maxx continued to use the TP5000 (9535) FD21 printers for a lot longer, until the former replaced them with a Wincor Nixdorf system by the 2010s. The latter initially used a newer Fujitsu system with Epson thermals, but now uses a HP system.
A lot of Building Societies in the UK still issue Passbooks with new savings accounts, and the branches still have dot-matrix printers, but the passbook is typically slid in the front horizontally, rather than the vertical slot arrangement on yours.
Those Phillips light bulbs with the unique shape were originally designed by Westinghouse. Philips kept the design when they purchased the Westinghouse lamp line. At work in the stairwells we had Westinghouse fluorescent tubes that had the little black cap on the end rather than aluminum. These were supposed to be bad for you because it did not block UV light. The only thing I can say it must have been great for the bulb because, unless we had a power failure those lamps were never turned off and those fluorescent tubes lasted over 20 years for the most part. The building was built in 1983 - 1985.
Most light bulbs actually last quite a bit longer if you never power cycle them, it's that act of kicking it on to light it that does most of the damage to the filaments
I know of a specific factory, which I will not name, that uses T8 fluorescent tubes on motion sensor switches. Bulbs start failing pretty quickly after a month of service. It's a real shame...
These shipped on the in-circuit test equipment we manufactured (and bought from HP/Agilent/Keysight). There are *so* many variations; we used serial and USB ones mostly. I still get a little anxious when hearing them print, since that usually indicated some frustrating failure I had to troubleshoot.
I personally have used this exact model of printer. It's a real workhorse! Your test print is fairly crisp, seems the printhead is in excellent condition! It might be a challenge to find ribbons for it, but I doubt it will need any routine maintenance other than dust/paper lint removal and paper feed gear lubrication. Ribbons simply lift straight out, and new ones drop straight in. Epson's dot-matrix printers seem to be much more robust than their thermal printers. The thermal printers need frequent print head cleaning (anywhere from once a day to once a week) or you get completely blank receipts. The cutting blade always jams in the thermal printers, preventing you from closing the lid after loading a new roll of paper - until you get in there with a wide flat screwdriver and FORCE the blade back into its resting position. I'd much rather have a serrated blade on the cover than the automatic cutting for that reason alone. 2:34 - I happen to be quite good at that dance move. Aside from the Macarena and a few disco moves, that's the extent of my dancing talent. 5:27 - I just Googled it, yes, that IS a genuine song from The Muppets. I don't remember it, but I recognized the voice of Rowlf immediately. 6:04 - 😲 "I'm the kind of guy that can make Sheryl CROW. I'm the kind of guy that can put Carrie UNDERWOOD. I'm the kind of guy that can leave Clay AIKEN... But I ain't that kind of guy." - Terry Fator (through his puppet character Walter T. Airdale)
The sound of these printers is something that I missed so much but never realized that. My parents owned a tiny market for some years and I was hearing that sound every day, but the modern printers dont even make any sound. This is so nostalgic!
I work for a electronics company in the UK we still use those epson printers on the ICT test machines to this day. The ICT test machines are 30 years old that is in use today. I have to service each week in part of a standard maintenance procedures for the ICT test machines. The ICT test machines are, 1 X Teradyne Z1850VP 3 X Teradyne Z1880 1 X Teradyne Z1840 manufactured in 1993 to 1995. I work for this company for 30 years. I remember these ICT test machines with this Epson printers what's on your RUclips video when they've been bought brand new. Great video.
For me it is always something special to print on the paper from the computer. In late 80's I made an adapter to use a Star printer on my Spectrum computer and later, when I got my MSX it came with its own printer that I used to print many projects for school. All my printers now have a form of legacy printer port to connect them to my old computers, my main one, a Kyocera Laser have both parallel and USB, a Ricoh Laser Fax/printer have parallel, USB and an optional serial interface (that can be swapped with the parallel interface). I also have a thermal printer for tickets that have USB and serial interface and an old and huge Epson dot matrix printer. All them I collected over the years from businesses that throwed them away and are in good shape and working condition.
We still have them in some stores in the Philippines as Thermal Printers are expensive, prints fade away after a few months, and are not environmentally friendly compared to dot-matrix printers. Iirc there are new ones of these with usb cables.
When I worked in a printshop in the early 1970's we printed many office forms on 8-1/2" x 11" carbonless paper. It was always referred to as "NCR Paper" both because it was patented by the NCR Corporation and because it is an acronym for No Carbon Required. It was all reverse collated (back page before front page) from the paper mill, so after it passed thru the offset press it would be in the right sequence for the transfer process to work.
Oh! Bank books! The young ones will never experience using them. And also, the joy of standing in a long bank line. I got my first bank book when I was 17 in 1990. Back then the teller used to write on them with a pen. Not this lazy printing stuff.
Another thing they will never experience is the manual Credit Card machine where they put your card in the bottom, a slip containing multiple sheets of Carbonless copy paper on top then pulled a large handle / roller thing over the top to leave the raised letters of the card as print. It was a big surprise recently to get new cards that don't have raised printing on them.
@@MrDuncl I used to work at an establishment that had one of those! I also used it in the early to mid 90's member' I'm an old! And even back then, the small business didn't take American Express cards.
I almost forgot about the sound of these! I remember the sound as a kid, although now at work they use thermal printers. Whilst I do appreciate the modern ones are quieter, the sound is pretty nostalgic! I still have a printing calculator somewhere that has a similar dot matrix printer.
Oh man, I forgot about feeding the check into the printer for validation. Used to have to do that all the time back when I worked at Best Buy in the service department (now Geek Squad) and would ring up anyone making a computer purchase. Back in the early 2000s, about half were check payments or cash.
It's totally crazy to think back at how popular checks were. Basically a piece of paper that says, "yeah... don't worry, mate ... I'm going to leave with the goods now, and you can hand that paper to someone else later and they'll give you the money." There was no guarantee that the money was in the account, or even that the account existed. And yet, that's how business was done between entities on a daily basis.
@@nickwallette6201"Were"? Many companies in many countries still prefer to operate by check, although I agree that for day-to-day they're barely used anymore.
@@DerekLippold And there are still business that only take checks or cash. There is a small, family run pizza parlor in my neighborhood that is like that. They only take checks or cash.
2:10 Pro tip: don't unplug the power supply like that! These connectors have a built-in locking mechanism that unlocks once you slide the black part with the markings on it backwards... That was hard to watch XD
You can pick up replacement PS-180 power supplies from Epson or Beagle Hardware. You can also pick up replacement interface modules from Beagle. Any interface module that's compatible with any of the TM-series printers will work, you just need to adjust the DIP switches under the door on the bottom of the printer. This printer is a close cousin to the Epson U200-series of impact printers used in kitchens, the latest model I believe is the Epson TM-U220. Pretty much the same printer, but without the validator.
Hehe, i see what you did with those bank balances at the end. Your content is getting very good. Youll be on technology connection's level before you know!
It was a parallel receipt printer just like that which got me into coding more seriously. I worked to figure out how to make it print and cut the paper from C++ to produce a point of sale console app. Just noticed you have difficulty getting it to print. You don't really need a driver with these parallel / serial printers. You can connect to the printer and get it to print using telnet and connecting to it via the comm port. You have to type blindly when connected but after you type enough characters, it'll print a line. That's what got me started.
When I got into coding microcontrollers 25 years ago one of my early projects was controlling a 1980's Epson-compatible dot-matrix printer. Back then I remember everything you needed to know to interface to it was in the printer's owners manual. It was surprisingly easy and satisfying to get it printing.
Typing directly to the printer, you can use the Carriage Return (ASCII 13, ) and Line Feed (ASCII 10, ) characters to move the print "carriage" to "return" to the left side and step down to start on a "new line". 🙂 I used to test remote network printers at work by telneting to the printer's IP address, and the particular port used by that model (typically 9100 for HP and many others). Some were different, with one port for ASCII and another for raw binary data. By sending a few lines of text I could bypass the print queue and make sure the printer itself was functioning properly before troubleshooting the print server or network.
I worked with those in restaurants for several years. Ours were serial or network interfaced, without the validator slot. It got really noisy at dinner volume, when the checks poured in. You always made sure you had spare paper rolls at the start of a shift. 😏 IIRC, all vintage dot matrix printers used the "hold down FF while powering on" function for a self-diagnostic.
It's nice to see some restaurants using a KDS for their cooking stations. I'd imagine it's a lot less stressful than worrying about losing the tickets especially during rush.
I was genuinely shocked to find out when this was actually made. Thermal printers were of course everywhere then like they are now, including Epson's own models, there were no doubt particular use cases that made this kind of printer still necessary that justified their being manufactured, though I can't easily figure out which those would be, other than those that use the slot.
Several comments: -The power connector is standard on POS printers. Is still used nowadays on new models of thermal receipt and label printers. IIRC it has 3 pins because it's dual power (12V and 24V? or 12V and 48V? I can't remember). -You don't need drivers for ESC/POS printers, you can use the "Standard text/only printer" driver and it works well, except you can't print graphics or text with TrueType/OpenType fonts; but you can still print text, and if the application sends ESC/POS commands, you can access features like bold, text size, automatic cutting, drawers, the beeper, even for storing/printing bitmap logos. -The ESC/POS format is not the same as the standard old Epson printers, as it's a lot more complex. But I guess some escape codes are similar enough that it somewhat worked. It's still used because it's a lot faster to print a receipt made with ESC/POS format than sending a graphic printing, but printers sold nowadays are starting to print fast enough for graphics printing being reasonable.
Costco uses a combo thermal/dot matrix receipt printer even today. Went over there for tires last week and they printed the receipt right on the invoice by sliding it in the slot. I think that's pretty fascinating since they could just staple the thermal receipt to the invoice as well.
Remember? I still work with one of these bad boys daily :D Although it uses an RJ-45 Ethernet cable to communicate with the PC, but still uses the same mechanism to print. And it's still as loud as this one lol
Feeding a check into these and hearing it make that sound is strangely satisfying for some reason. I always wanted stuff like this but not sure what i would do with it besides typing out a letter to someone and print it to that, sending it snail mail and wait for their reaction haha
I like those old noisy receipt printers like that because the print on the receipt does not fade over time unlike those thermal printers commonly used today which the print on the receipt gradually fades over time until it turns blank.
Can't beat the sound of a dot-matrix printer, sure I may be having fun with an OkiMate 20 now (a thermal printer that can print in colour, slowly, very, very slowly), but, there's something about those pins slapping against paper that is just pure nostalgia, whether it's a till receipt, or a stupid-wide printout of data, DM printers are just hilarious (and I still get the odd comment on my Oki Microline 280 Elite video on my other channel, mostly about how people find it obnoxiously loud!!!)... :D
The PAR Port unit is a swap out unit can be serial, 485,can and later even USB , the cash drawer part was used for more than just popping a drawer , in cafe situations it would trigger another printer in another location called kitchen printer. the book print section was also used in loyalty books at the British Post Office. I also happen to have a box of these if you want, PSU's, swappable IO, ribbons. Also on driver side 90% off applications did direct to LPT/SPP/SPP 485 comms and did not need a driver as this was a standard in banks so well used elsewhere. IF you look at some COBOL code you will see that it's based on epson standard from way back.
Also EPSON and Cherry produced keyboards for shops/banks/BlockBusters with text under keys and mag reader strips that connected direct and indirect to these printers. Again all used serial, par port, 485, ps2 keyboard. the text for a key ment they could punch a bunch of video prices with one key(eg $5 latest video and 2 x 99c cartoons for $6.98 + free coke at pizza hut ) , i have one two of these still. odly enough the keyboards have power passthrough for printer but not other way around. Also bank units even in early days had money counter input, it was just a pulse and you entered the Value x Y , modern ones have a camera for country, serial number, value etc
I don't see how the cash drawer port can be used to drive another printer. Kitchen printers are usually driven directly from POS as the receipt printers are, at least in the venues I support. And the protocol you are referring to is EPSON ESC/POS. Lots of documentation for it online.
Neat find, even cooler for having the PSU, parallel cable, appropriate transfer paper and everything working. Especially loves the "special image" you printed off in the other more modern printer demo! 🤣 This video is exactly what I needed, having gotten off to a crap start today. As a sidenote be careful with the receipt paper, it's loaded with PCB's and that's why they don't make that particular type of transfer paper anymore.
@@vwestlife Just be careful, there's no guarantee it's not import junk.. New paper with PCB's are still cropping up in the US slipping through the cracks mainly from eBay and other dodgy sources.. China still has no formal ban, and India's phaseout won't be until 2025
I remember those well. I used to administer a whole fleet of them in a previous life. The ones I looked after were brand new in 2003. You _can_ install it under Windows XP (and later Windows OSes for which Epson didn't -- at least not during the time I still had any reason to care about such things -- bother to release drivers). It works fine when set up with Microsoft's generic text only print driver. Even the validation feature still worked, suggesting that what I'll call "industry specific" software was able to send the needed control/escape code sequences and the driver was willing to pass them unaltered. The Epson driver supported graphics printing, interestingly enough. It offered three resolutions if memory serves.
I have a Epson TM-U220PD Dot Matrix receipt printer (And a nice collection of about 10 thermal receipt printers too). Dot Matrix receipt printers are also still used in restaurant kitchens, because of the thicker paper, ability to get carbon copies for tracking tickets, and the ability to support multiple colours (usually red and black). Like you mentioned, the parallel port connector there is a separate module/card that plugs in, that is how the other connectors are facilitated- you can swap them out. For my U220, I wasn't able to get it to work with the parallel card it had installed so I swapped in a serial card and with that I was able to install the epson drivers and configure the POS Software I work on to use it. Your issues you had trying to use it with the Epson standard is because the one you were using would be ESC/P, or Epson Standard Code for Printers, but Epson receipt printers use a similar, but slightly different language, called ESC/POS, or Epson Standard Code for Point of Sale.
holy crap that's a sound I haven't heard in a LOOONG time... you'd hear that in the store constantly droning on, but I never gave it a second thought... funny how something so mundane can become so interesting years later.
I used to work as a cashier at Circuit City and remember these dot matrix receipt printers before they switched to thermal! IBM also had these dot matrix printers decades ago. The biggest problem with these dot matrix isn’t just the loud noises, it’s the fading ribbon ink and longer changing process, unlike thermal printing which only uses the thermal paper as the consumable material for printing!
They're fast, they're easy, and they're also crap. Take a thermal paper receipt out of your wallet after a year and tell me how great they are. 😵💫. I make a photocopy of any receipt I need to keep for period of time. Even stuck in a drawer they can fade away after a year. Terrible archive technology.
@@randyab9go188 Reminds me of when I did any shopping at a BestBuy. Yeah... BestBuy and their magically disappearing thermal receipts. Say you went and bought an expensive item from them. A few months down the road, and you have to show proof of purchase. Well you can't anymore! ... You did remember to photocopy the BestBuy receipt from Day 1 of purchase, right?
@@randyab9go188 you know they do that because they want to prevent long merchandise returns for more than few months! As someone that used to work in retail stores, dot matrix receipts have be easily forged by hackers back then!
I remember having a Star Micronics NX-1000 was that the name well it was colour and printing graphics was very noisy and my mother hated it. I had this one hooked up to my Amiga. I can remember in the 80's having my bank book filled in by hand and later on they used the printer.
Very cool video. I work in a restaurant and we use a slightly more modern Epson printer for food orders. I get a very similar self test print out whenever I reset it, I even use the same white/yellow paper rolls lol
Not really. Checks were validated in-house only to ensure that the account was not on the Bad Checks list, and not that this check itself was any good.
@@teebob21Sigh. I used the word 'validated' because that's what the host used in the video. I lived through this era, and it was very common for stores to run the check through the printer like this to endorse it or whatever.
@@timfischer Mostly correct. While this particular model does not include a MICR scanner, some receipt printers of the era did. When a payment by check was tendered, the check would be scanned and the machine would read the magnetic ink that encoded the routing number and account number. Most point-of-sale systems would then perform a lookup against that number to verify that the account was not present on a blacklist of known bad check writers. If it wasn't, the account number and transaction amount was written to a daily ledger for later accounting and till balancing. The printer would then endorse the check for deposit. Validation is an entirely different financial process, and definitions are important. Not only did I also live through this era, I did this for a living.
@@teebob21Your complaint about the use of the word 'validation' is with the original video, not me. I put it in quotes to show that I was commenting on the video, not using the word properly. The video claims these printers were used by banks to "validate" the checks. Did you watch it?
This brought up massive nostalgia to supermarkets and department stores in the 90's when you first gave the demo. How I have missed this sound. Even in the banks, I think whenever I go into a branch, the deposit receipts are still impact prints, even though I don't think they use the books anymore. I don't have a savings account today but even when I started one as an adult at Fleet in 2004 I didn't have a book then.
Other things that have gone out of fashion are * Price labels with a magnetic strip on them (they predated barcodes) * Going back even further tills linked to change machines with all the coins in perspex tubes. I have only seen one picture of them, but they actually had them linked to electromechanical tills in the local supermarket when it opened in the early 1970s and got rid of them when they switched to electronic tills at the end of the 1970s.
@@MrDuncl I don't know if I ever saw a magnetic strip used that way, only for security. I mostly remember cashiers typing in a price or item code or scanning a barcode (with the pleasant chime on a successful scan). Whenever I had to use a numpad and had something fast to type it would always remind me of the cashiers.
@@alextirrellRI I think the magnetic stripe labels were in John Lewis department store. They read them using a wand type thing attached to the cash register. I just did a quick Google and to my surprise you can still buy similar labels from a company called Goldcrest Products. I have no idea what people use them for these days.
@@MrDunclI've mostly seen them being used for security, being too young to remember their usage outside of loss prevention. Though I definitely remember when they used the IBM 4683 with Model 2 dot matrix printers. However, I've always wondered how on earth they got them to work with C&P terminals, given that the system was ancient.
At work we called those types 'carbon papers' NCR paper. We use yellow for the middle copy and pink for the third sheet, and, of course, white for the original.
The power supply connector is actually standard for thermal and impact printers with external power bricks. I can't recall the name but Star Micronics printers even today still use that port if the power brick is external.
I did POS support for 10 years, the check part was also called a Franker. You can still get modern printers such as the Toshiba 2CR. They can even scan an image of the check for electronic processing of checks!
I knew a guy who bought three different receipt printers or different types and sizes and used to manufacture his own receipts for business-related reimbursement by his employer. He got away with it for years until he submitted a particularly spicy receipt and accounting cross-checked and weren't able to find the fake restaurant he supposedly dined at.
In the 90s I worked at a store (UK) which had a similar printer. It would print UK cheques. You slid them up a slope in the front and had to hold them in place until the roller caught them. It would also fill in old fashioned credit card voucher.
Look up the Epson ESC/P printer control language. It uses an "Escape P" character sequence to control printer functions for font, attributes, etc. At [9:30] in the video the word "Epson" dropped the starting letter, possibly getting lost due to the preceding escape control character (27). ESC/P is a popular printer command language, like HP's PCL or the Postscript PDL (page description language). At work years ago I had to figure out the PCL escape codes to send to a Xerox 4520 printer to have it select an external add-on paper feeder to print on card stock, while regular printouts used the internal paper trays.
You probably tried it, but sometimes those older devices work on newer machines if you change the parallel port mode in the BIOS to SPP or EPP instead of the default ECP.
You beat me to it, I was going to suggest the same thing. I wonder if a USB-to-Parallel cable would work on it, allowing newer computers to connect with it.
I recently started watching a YT channel that has recordings in various stores during the 80s to 00s. I watched a video of a Barnes & Noble in 1997, the sound of the receipts printing and change sloshing in the register, what nostalgia.
As recently as this year (meaning they're very likely still in use) the Pennsylvania State Liquor Stores use receipt printers that use a ribbon, albeit more modern than this one. They even have the validation function, which is used for bar/restaurant orders in-store. Come to think of it, the main receipt part is probably ribbon-less, but the validation part of it absolutely still uses a ribbon (I've had to replace them).
I do like these videos you make where you show unusual or quirky pieces of equipment that everyday people usually don't use. Here's an interesting idea for you, why not try connecting this printer to the VTech IQ Unlimited computer you have. See if you can print a document from that computer to this printer.
This reminds me of the receipt printers I used in the mid 2000’s. The ones we used could print directly onto cheques but instead of a vertical slot, it would take it through a rear feed mechanism on the back that would spit the cheque back out from the front of the printer.
Thrift/charity shops are still a great find for bargains. I managed to pick up an HP all in one colour laser/scanner/copier for £30 as it was described as not working. All it required was a new security chip on the yellow toner. Nice find on the receipt printer for $15.
No such luck around me. There are too many professional ebay hawkers who do this full time, vigilantly scooping out anything of these sorts. Everything is cleaned out by the time regular folks get a chance to even look.
@@oldtwinsna8347 Occasionally I get lucky and find some decent Creative PC speakers or JVC mini-speakers. But there's almost never anything high-end. The closest I got is an Akai tape deck.
If you ever get the chance to pick up, one of the small Epson.matrix printers which are used in transport, ( Waybridge) there were a lot of money and they also do carbon copies because each ( Waybridge) ticket has three copies all printed at the same time on carbon paper and I do believe them printers are worth quite a lot of money and still brought brand-new because as you mentioned in this video. Make sure it’s printers can do the carbon copies all at the same time in one pass
On a modern machine you can just use the generic text only printer driver pointing to your LPT port or even just pipe a command from CMD to the port "dir > lpt1" works fine.
i believe that same one (or an identical model) is still used at my work, i can always hear it printing in the kitchen. its gray and has micros branding on it so idk if its made by epson or not. edit: did some research and its actually a TM-U220B model, but they sound the exact same.
I wish there was a store like this in my area You find all sorts of cool stuff I remember upgrading Macy's POS system and loading the firmware for their printers and card readers It was amazing how much information we had to load on ever reader
Looks like the original Epson TM-U325 was released in 1996 with either a serial or parallel interface, and then they added the USB option later, and kept selling it for many years.
I have installed a ton of these printers, mostly serially interfaced. We have done even more of the TM-U295, the lightweight ticket printer where you insert the ticket on a flatbed and the printer grabs it and prints your data, and the TM-U590 which is the heavy duty ticket printer for doing more than one or two carbon(less) copies on wider tickets. There is a fairly thick manual detailing the escape sequences the printer understands to change fonts and print modes and other operations like opening the cash drawer. These printers are a family and they're all very similar, dating back to the late 1990's. They are still used where multiple copies or print that won't turn black in the Sun are required. Before 1995 or so the standard for this sort of printer was three times bigger, weighed ten pounds, and wasn't half as capable. The Windows drivers for these printers don't work very well and aren't really the way they were designed to be used.
That takes me back to shopping at HMV in the 90's, they had noisy receipt printers but they were way slower than your one. Strange about the bold sort of working but not quite. The Epson ESC/P codes these printers used were very universal, I knew most of them by heart having written invoicing software. Maybe there's some settings that will fix that.
A subsequent model that’s still dot matrix is still sold today. It’s used by kitchens mostly, and usb or Ethernet or WiFi. Also, windows xp would also probably be fine with either installing the driver inf manually, or using the generic / plain text driver.
Huh. I was just talking with my sister about the classic receipt printers the other day. I sure miss them. Oh yeah, good news related to light bulbs: I found a couple more Philips IQ bulbs at my local resale shop the other day. Two Auto-Off bulbs, seemingly unused, with their packages. Pretty nifty, eh?
I'm not sure if the bank I'm with still has any customers with passbook accounts, but last time I made a deposit in my local branch, I was given a receipt printed on that carbonless paper and printed on a validation printer. This was about 6 months ago.
Part of my job is helping a local POS supplier with support, and we still use a descendant of this printer for kitchens. Kitchens get hot, you leave a ticket in the wrong spot and if it's thermal it'll just turn black. Dot matrix is far from dead.
So THAT’S why kitchens always use dot matrix printers! Makes sense.
Yep, local plumbing supply store still uses Dot matrix for carbon copy receipts. They actually just bought a couple 16 pins brand new a year ago. They still look exactly like they did in 1998 lol.
they're useful in the kitchen at the restaurant I work at so different stations can all get a carbon copy of each ticket
Also grease! Just makes thermal paper go translucent.
@@frostbite1991Can confirm, as one of the people who works at a plumbing supply house and has to separate seemingly 10000 carbon copies a day 😂
Reminds me of the time when I worked as a cashier. I figured out how to mess with the settings of the thermal printers and noticed that if I put the printer on the slowest setting the receipts would be much more legible and immune to fading. Surprisingly, it didn't print that much slower and it also was quite a bit quieter, so I slowly changed all the registers to use the slower print setting. Nobody noticed but I def felt way more prouder than I should've been haha
You did a service for all of us who got a recipe we literally could not read. My all your future endeavors prosper
May* lol
A true friend of the people! I applaud this.
Karma points gained! 👌
Where I work we use direct thermal for label printing, our printers are on maximum heat and speed. lol
This things are so cool. Having grown up hearing these print, can't help feeling a little nostalgic listening to them today.
I love seeing old technology still working.
Gawd. Every department store, grocery store, you name it, had printers that sounded like these up until at least the late 2000's early 2010s. Hearing that printer sound brings me back to shopping with my mom and being in checkout lanes as a kid.
I remember those large grey noisy recipient printers at banks,department stores, grocery stores and restaurants in the late 80s and early 90s. Love the sound of them along with the sound PC harddrives made in the 80s and 90s.
Oh yes, now that you mention it, I remember the sound of turning on my Philips P3302 (if I recall the model number correctly), a 80286 at 16MHz. It had an oversized red toggle switch at the right back corner, so you got that satisfying "kachunk" sound. Then you'd hear the harddrive spinning up, which took a while, it was so large it took up 2 5¼" bays. I think it had about 20MB of storage capacity. Of course it wasn't an IDE drive either, those came later. It connected with two differently sized ribbon cables to the ISA expansion card that was the hard drive controller. I think it was called a Winchester interface. Good memories :)
I remember them too (especially at stores in my town that had older equipment, like Sears, since I didn't even grow up as far back as the 90s), and they kinda still have them today at both the movie theaters in my town to print tickets, but it just seems to be the noise that carried over because those ones are all newer (probably thermal).
I worked at CVS in the early 2000s during the time they transitioned to thermal receipt printers. Before the switch, they had just introduced bar-coded receipts (to facilitate returns), and the infamous bar-coded ExtraCare coupons. Printing time, noise, and appetite for ink ribbons skyrocketed.
CVS is a rip-off
@samholdsworth420 I miss Long's and wish they hadn't been bought out.
@@desertdude540 man, I totally forgot about longs drugs 😂
@@samholdsworth420 Longs Drugs. havent heard that name in forever. Save-On too lol
@@samholdsworth420 Don't even have CVS here in Canada. It's Shoppers Drug Mart and Rexall instead of Walgreens and CVS.
I use to work in retail. The printer power cable was hard to remove because it has a latching mechanism yiu need to pull the latching mechanism backwards before you can remove the power cable. Also you actually don't need a special driver for most of these text based printers as windows has a built in text only driver that works fine with many models of text printers.
That "Thanks for watching!" print out at the end made me smile. Great video! Thank you!
When I worked at Citizens Bank in the early 2010s, there were a surprising number of people who still hung on to those passbook savings accounts. They were always getting messed up because it was possible to do transactions without the book. Moms would come in to re-sync offline transactions to the ledger for their kids' college accounts they were raiding, and little old ladies would come in to get the earned interest printed every month.
My mum kept her passbook until the bank forced her to stop by simply no longer providing the books. That was late 2000s in Australia. I remember the transaction receipts, the white and yellow copies. This is bringing up memories of waiting FOREVER in line at the bank, the absolute boredom. Except the nostalgia is just making this video even better
I still have one of those, lol. (and I'm only 23, so I didn't know that these types of saving accounts were that common back in the days. Though then again, I don't know how it was here in Germany)
But it normally isn't possible to make a transaction without the book.
@@DeGandalf It wasn't supposed to be possible to do transactions without the book at first, but there was a period of time (when online banking was new) where customers realized they could move money to/from passbook accounts. Eventually when the bank discovered the oversight, they added the opttion for this and in branch transactions to be performed and stored for later update/sync to the paper book.
I worked for Citizens from 1994 to 2019…. The passbooks were originally printed on IBM 4720 printers that allowed for passbooks to pass through from the front to the top of the printer. That printer also had a journal roll in the back that is exactly as the yellow paper in this video (just wider and white in color). All transactions would be recorded on it. We then moved to the Wincor document printer that had a pass through from front to back. They were bulletproof. For receipts we went to a dual color ink jet based Epson printer. It was awful as it blew through the ink.
i wish passbooks were still available here. they seem much more convenient for how i conduct my financial activities, and i like the aspect of having the possibility to have your transaction on a physical document and not having to print out a tiny receipt from the ATM or logging in to on-line/mobile banking
There's something so appealing about the idea of printing weird poetry onto receipt paper and giving them to random people.
My local grocery store used these until about 2005. That sound was so satisfying
ESC/POS is the printer language the machine uses. Any driver that speaks that should work with it. UNIX systems running CUPS have robust receipt printer support for some reason. Might be worth trying it on that. At the end of the day though, most Windows applications don't even use a driver with these. They do the DOS method of just formatting the print jobs themselves and sending the print jobs raw to the receipt printer instead.
That is because many POS manufacturers use Linux as their base OS. QNX was prominent back in time, too.
Here in the Philippines, dot-matrix receipt printers are still commonly used (particularly the Epson TM-U220 series) due to tax laws enacted in 2015 prohibiting the use of thermal paper because of concerns about receipts fading. But large retailers here still use thermal printers, provided that they issue handwritten receipts upon request.
The carbon copy wasn't the only method of duplicating receipts. I've seen tills with printers that are much wider than the customer receipt, and they print the information twice - once on the customer copy, once on a second roll that is kept inside the till for store records.
IBM had an older POS printer that had that, with a journal log.
Sainsbury's shops in the UK used this type of printer. I can still hear the sound of the printer printing two receipts per pass in my mind's ear even now. You could tell from the sound that the 'internal' reel had more information printed per line than the customer copy.
IBM Model 2 3 or 4 pritner
@@timf-tinkering I used to repair these, they were the ICL later Fujitsu/ICL Teampos printers. Absolutely solid printers! Sainsburys moved to the Epson TM-H6000II and later onto NCR RealPOS. Epson's equivalent was the TM-950.
Waitrose and TK Maxx continued to use the TP5000 (9535) FD21 printers for a lot longer, until the former replaced them with a Wincor Nixdorf system by the 2010s. The latter initially used a newer Fujitsu system with Epson thermals, but now uses a HP system.
Not just interesting technology - but always with an eye towards 80s home micros - I think all things in life should be this way
A lot of Building Societies in the UK still issue Passbooks with new savings accounts, and the branches still have dot-matrix printers, but the passbook is typically slid in the front horizontally, rather than the vertical slot arrangement on yours.
Those Phillips light bulbs with the unique shape were originally designed by Westinghouse. Philips kept the design when they purchased the Westinghouse lamp line. At work in the stairwells we had Westinghouse fluorescent tubes that had the little black cap on the end rather than aluminum. These were supposed to be bad for you because it did not block UV light. The only thing I can say it must have been great for the bulb because, unless we had a power failure those lamps were never turned off and those fluorescent tubes lasted over 20 years for the most part. The building was built in 1983 - 1985.
The glass itself should block the UV light. Related, I still see lots of black-cap fluorescents. Love to see 'em.
Most light bulbs actually last quite a bit longer if you never power cycle them, it's that act of kicking it on to light it that does most of the damage to the filaments
I know of a specific factory, which I will not name, that uses T8 fluorescent tubes on motion sensor switches. Bulbs start failing pretty quickly after a month of service. It's a real shame...
These shipped on the in-circuit test equipment we manufactured (and bought from HP/Agilent/Keysight). There are *so* many variations; we used serial and USB ones mostly. I still get a little anxious when hearing them print, since that usually indicated some frustrating failure I had to troubleshoot.
I personally have used this exact model of printer. It's a real workhorse! Your test print is fairly crisp, seems the printhead is in excellent condition! It might be a challenge to find ribbons for it, but I doubt it will need any routine maintenance other than dust/paper lint removal and paper feed gear lubrication. Ribbons simply lift straight out, and new ones drop straight in.
Epson's dot-matrix printers seem to be much more robust than their thermal printers. The thermal printers need frequent print head cleaning (anywhere from once a day to once a week) or you get completely blank receipts. The cutting blade always jams in the thermal printers, preventing you from closing the lid after loading a new roll of paper - until you get in there with a wide flat screwdriver and FORCE the blade back into its resting position. I'd much rather have a serrated blade on the cover than the automatic cutting for that reason alone.
2:34 - I happen to be quite good at that dance move. Aside from the Macarena and a few disco moves, that's the extent of my dancing talent.
5:27 - I just Googled it, yes, that IS a genuine song from The Muppets. I don't remember it, but I recognized the voice of Rowlf immediately.
6:04 - 😲 "I'm the kind of guy that can make Sheryl CROW. I'm the kind of guy that can put Carrie UNDERWOOD. I'm the kind of guy that can leave Clay AIKEN... But I ain't that kind of guy." - Terry Fator (through his puppet character Walter T. Airdale)
Cool. I love dot-matrix printers, such an iconic sound.
The sound of these printers is something that I missed so much but never realized that.
My parents owned a tiny market for some years and I was hearing that sound every day, but the modern printers dont even make any sound.
This is so nostalgic!
I really like the Demonstration and history of these old printers
Nostalgia levels are dialed up to ten. I remember those receipt printers.
I work for a electronics company in the UK we still use those epson printers on the ICT test machines to this day.
The ICT test machines are 30 years old that is in use today.
I have to service each week in part of a standard maintenance procedures for the ICT test machines.
The ICT test machines are,
1 X Teradyne Z1850VP
3 X Teradyne Z1880
1 X Teradyne Z1840
manufactured in 1993 to 1995.
I work for this company for 30 years.
I remember these ICT test machines with this Epson printers what's on your RUclips video when they've been bought brand new.
Great video.
For me it is always something special to print on the paper from the computer. In late 80's I made an adapter to use a Star printer on my Spectrum computer and later, when I got my MSX it came with its own printer that I used to print many projects for school. All my printers now have a form of legacy printer port to connect them to my old computers, my main one, a Kyocera Laser have both parallel and USB, a Ricoh Laser Fax/printer have parallel, USB and an optional serial interface (that can be swapped with the parallel interface). I also have a thermal printer for tickets that have USB and serial interface and an old and huge Epson dot matrix printer. All them I collected over the years from businesses that throwed them away and are in good shape and working condition.
We still have them in some stores in the Philippines as Thermal Printers are expensive, prints fade away after a few months, and are not environmentally friendly compared to dot-matrix printers.
Iirc there are new ones of these with usb cables.
When I worked in a printshop in the early 1970's we printed many office forms on 8-1/2" x 11" carbonless paper. It was always referred to as "NCR Paper" both because it was patented by the NCR Corporation and because it is an acronym for No Carbon Required. It was all reverse collated (back page before front page) from the paper mill, so after it passed thru the offset press it would be in the right sequence for the transfer process to work.
Oh! Bank books! The young ones will never experience using them. And also, the joy of standing in a long bank line. I got my first bank book when I was 17 in 1990. Back then the teller used to write on them with a pen. Not this lazy printing stuff.
Another thing they will never experience is the manual Credit Card machine where they put your card in the bottom, a slip containing multiple sheets of Carbonless copy paper on top then pulled a large handle / roller thing over the top to leave the raised letters of the card as print. It was a big surprise recently to get new cards that don't have raised printing on them.
@@MrDuncl I used to work at an establishment that had one of those! I also used it in the early to mid 90's member' I'm an old! And even back then, the small business didn't take American Express cards.
I almost forgot about the sound of these! I remember the sound as a kid, although now at work they use thermal printers. Whilst I do appreciate the modern ones are quieter, the sound is pretty nostalgic! I still have a printing calculator somewhere that has a similar dot matrix printer.
Oh man, I forgot about feeding the check into the printer for validation. Used to have to do that all the time back when I worked at Best Buy in the service department (now Geek Squad) and would ring up anyone making a computer purchase. Back in the early 2000s, about half were check payments or cash.
It's totally crazy to think back at how popular checks were. Basically a piece of paper that says, "yeah... don't worry, mate ... I'm going to leave with the goods now, and you can hand that paper to someone else later and they'll give you the money."
There was no guarantee that the money was in the account, or even that the account existed. And yet, that's how business was done between entities on a daily basis.
@@nickwallette6201"Were"? Many companies in many countries still prefer to operate by check, although I agree that for day-to-day they're barely used anymore.
There is an unfortunate amount of people who still pay by check even though it’s completely useless and unnecessary.
@@nickwallette6201Checks were a token of a high trust society.
@@DerekLippold And there are still business that only take checks or cash. There is a small, family run pizza parlor in my neighborhood that is like that. They only take checks or cash.
2:10 Pro tip: don't unplug the power supply like that! These connectors have a built-in locking mechanism that unlocks once you slide the black part with the markings on it backwards... That was hard to watch XD
Indeed, I was wincing the whole time, too! 😂
You can pick up replacement PS-180 power supplies from Epson or Beagle Hardware. You can also pick up replacement interface modules from Beagle. Any interface module that's compatible with any of the TM-series printers will work, you just need to adjust the DIP switches under the door on the bottom of the printer. This printer is a close cousin to the Epson U200-series of impact printers used in kitchens, the latest model I believe is the Epson TM-U220. Pretty much the same printer, but without the validator.
Hehe, i see what you did with those bank balances at the end. Your content is getting very good. Youll be on technology connection's level before you know!
It was a parallel receipt printer just like that which got me into coding more seriously. I worked to figure out how to make it print and cut the paper from C++ to produce a point of sale console app. Just noticed you have difficulty getting it to print. You don't really need a driver with these parallel / serial printers. You can connect to the printer and get it to print using telnet and connecting to it via the comm port. You have to type blindly when connected but after you type enough characters, it'll print a line. That's what got me started.
When I got into coding microcontrollers 25 years ago one of my early projects was controlling a 1980's Epson-compatible dot-matrix printer. Back then I remember everything you needed to know to interface to it was in the printer's owners manual. It was surprisingly easy and satisfying to get it printing.
Typing directly to the printer, you can use the Carriage Return (ASCII 13,
) and Line Feed (ASCII 10,
) characters to move the print "carriage" to "return" to the left side and step down to start on a "new line". 🙂
I used to test remote network printers at work by telneting to the printer's IP address, and the particular port used by that model (typically 9100 for HP and many others). Some were different, with one port for ASCII and another for raw binary data. By sending a few lines of text I could bypass the print queue and make sure the printer itself was functioning properly before troubleshooting the print server or network.
I worked with those in restaurants for several years. Ours were serial or network interfaced, without the validator slot. It got really noisy at dinner volume, when the checks poured in. You always made sure you had spare paper rolls at the start of a shift. 😏
IIRC, all vintage dot matrix printers used the "hold down FF while powering on" function for a self-diagnostic.
It's nice to see some restaurants using a KDS for their cooking stations. I'd imagine it's a lot less stressful than worrying about losing the tickets especially during rush.
I was genuinely shocked to find out when this was actually made. Thermal printers were of course everywhere then like they are now, including Epson's own models, there were no doubt particular use cases that made this kind of printer still necessary that justified their being manufactured, though I can't easily figure out which those would be, other than those that use the slot.
Several comments:
-The power connector is standard on POS printers. Is still used nowadays on new models of thermal receipt and label printers. IIRC it has 3 pins because it's dual power (12V and 24V? or 12V and 48V? I can't remember).
-You don't need drivers for ESC/POS printers, you can use the "Standard text/only printer" driver and it works well, except you can't print graphics or text with TrueType/OpenType fonts; but you can still print text, and if the application sends ESC/POS commands, you can access features like bold, text size, automatic cutting, drawers, the beeper, even for storing/printing bitmap logos.
-The ESC/POS format is not the same as the standard old Epson printers, as it's a lot more complex. But I guess some escape codes are similar enough that it somewhat worked. It's still used because it's a lot faster to print a receipt made with ESC/POS format than sending a graphic printing, but printers sold nowadays are starting to print fast enough for graphics printing being reasonable.
Costco uses a combo thermal/dot matrix receipt printer even today. Went over there for tires last week and they printed the receipt right on the invoice by sliding it in the slot. I think that's pretty fascinating since they could just staple the thermal receipt to the invoice as well.
If you think about it, by printing it on it, you/they don't have to worry about the receipt falling off.
Remember? I still work with one of these bad boys daily :D
Although it uses an RJ-45 Ethernet cable to communicate with the PC, but still uses the same mechanism to print.
And it's still as loud as this one lol
Feeding a check into these and hearing it make that sound is strangely satisfying for some reason. I always wanted stuff like this but not sure what i would do with it besides typing out a letter to someone and print it to that, sending it snail mail and wait for their reaction haha
I like those old noisy receipt printers like that because the print on the receipt does not fade over time unlike those thermal printers commonly used today which the print on the receipt gradually fades over time until it turns blank.
Can't beat the sound of a dot-matrix printer, sure I may be having fun with an OkiMate 20 now (a thermal printer that can print in colour, slowly, very, very slowly), but, there's something about those pins slapping against paper that is just pure nostalgia, whether it's a till receipt, or a stupid-wide printout of data, DM printers are just hilarious (and I still get the odd comment on my Oki Microline 280 Elite video on my other channel, mostly about how people find it obnoxiously loud!!!)... :D
NCR printers had their own sounds for sure.
The PAR Port unit is a swap out unit can be serial, 485,can and later even USB , the cash drawer part was used for more than just popping a drawer , in cafe situations it would trigger another printer in another location called kitchen printer. the book print section was also used in loyalty books at the British Post Office. I also happen to have a box of these if you want, PSU's, swappable IO, ribbons. Also on driver side 90% off applications did direct to LPT/SPP/SPP 485 comms and did not need a driver as this was a standard in banks so well used elsewhere. IF you look at some COBOL code you will see that it's based on epson standard from way back.
Also EPSON and Cherry produced keyboards for shops/banks/BlockBusters with text under keys and mag reader strips that connected direct and indirect to these printers. Again all used serial, par port, 485, ps2 keyboard. the text for a key ment they could punch a bunch of video prices with one key(eg $5 latest video and 2 x 99c cartoons for $6.98 + free coke at pizza hut ) , i have one two of these still. odly enough the keyboards have power passthrough for printer but not other way around. Also bank units even in early days had money counter input, it was just a pulse and you entered the Value x Y , modern ones have a camera for country, serial number, value etc
I don't see how the cash drawer port can be used to drive another printer.
Kitchen printers are usually driven directly from POS as the receipt printers are, at least in the venues I support.
And the protocol you are referring to is EPSON ESC/POS. Lots of documentation for it online.
Gosh, what a sound, definitely remember hearing similar units when getting a receipt honestly not all that long ago at all.
Really cool unit!
I guess it FEELS like it wasn't long ago and yet...
Neat find, even cooler for having the PSU, parallel cable, appropriate transfer paper and everything working. Especially loves the "special image" you printed off in the other more modern printer demo! 🤣 This video is exactly what I needed, having gotten off to a crap start today.
As a sidenote be careful with the receipt paper, it's loaded with PCB's and that's why they don't make that particular type of transfer paper anymore.
PCBs were banned in the 1970s. Carbonless paper still isn't good for you to spend a lot of time handling, but it doesn't contain PCBs anymore.
@@vwestlife Just be careful, there's no guarantee it's not import junk.. New paper with PCB's are still cropping up in the US slipping through the cracks mainly from eBay and other dodgy sources.. China still has no formal ban, and India's phaseout won't be until 2025
@@vwestlife Bisphenol A (BPA) is sometimes found in thermal paper, I don't know about carbonless paper though.
I remember those well. I used to administer a whole fleet of them in a previous life. The ones I looked after were brand new in 2003. You _can_ install it under Windows XP (and later Windows OSes for which Epson didn't -- at least not during the time I still had any reason to care about such things -- bother to release drivers). It works fine when set up with Microsoft's generic text only print driver. Even the validation feature still worked, suggesting that what I'll call "industry specific" software was able to send the needed control/escape code sequences and the driver was willing to pass them unaltered.
The Epson driver supported graphics printing, interestingly enough. It offered three resolutions if memory serves.
glad to see I'm not the only one who loves okd stuff like this...I just love the sound of this machine!
I have a Epson TM-U220PD Dot Matrix receipt printer (And a nice collection of about 10 thermal receipt printers too). Dot Matrix receipt printers are also still used in restaurant kitchens, because of the thicker paper, ability to get carbon copies for tracking tickets, and the ability to support multiple colours (usually red and black). Like you mentioned, the parallel port connector there is a separate module/card that plugs in, that is how the other connectors are facilitated- you can swap them out. For my U220, I wasn't able to get it to work with the parallel card it had installed so I swapped in a serial card and with that I was able to install the epson drivers and configure the POS Software I work on to use it. Your issues you had trying to use it with the Epson standard is because the one you were using would be ESC/P, or Epson Standard Code for Printers, but Epson receipt printers use a similar, but slightly different language, called ESC/POS, or Epson Standard Code for Point of Sale.
I think "Epson Standard Code" for ESC is a backronym from the fact that it sends commands to the printer by using the escape character (ASCII 27).
holy crap that's a sound I haven't heard in a LOOONG time... you'd hear that in the store constantly droning on, but I never gave it a second thought... funny how something so mundane can become so interesting years later.
I used to work as a cashier at Circuit City and remember these dot matrix receipt printers before they switched to thermal! IBM also had these dot matrix printers decades ago. The biggest problem with these dot matrix isn’t just the loud noises, it’s the fading ribbon ink and longer changing process, unlike thermal printing which only uses the thermal paper as the consumable material for printing!
They're fast, they're easy, and they're also crap. Take a thermal paper receipt out of your wallet after a year and tell me how great they are. 😵💫. I make a photocopy of any receipt I need to keep for period of time. Even stuck in a drawer they can fade away after a year. Terrible archive technology.
@@randyab9go188 Reminds me of when I did any shopping at a BestBuy. Yeah... BestBuy and their magically disappearing thermal receipts. Say you went and bought an expensive item from them. A few months down the road, and you have to show proof of purchase. Well you can't anymore!
... You did remember to photocopy the BestBuy receipt from Day 1 of purchase, right?
@@randyab9go188 you know they do that because they want to prevent long merchandise returns for more than few months! As someone that used to work in retail stores, dot matrix receipts have be easily forged by hackers back then!
I remember having a Star Micronics NX-1000 was that the name well it was colour and printing graphics was very noisy and my mother hated it. I had this one hooked up to my Amiga. I can remember in the 80's having my bank book filled in by hand and later on they used the printer.
Very cool video. I work in a restaurant and we use a slightly more modern Epson printer for food orders. I get a very similar self test print out whenever I reset it, I even use the same white/yellow paper rolls lol
Checks were absolutely 'validated' by the stores themselves, not just a bank.
Not really. Checks were validated in-house only to ensure that the account was not on the Bad Checks list, and not that this check itself was any good.
@@teebob21Sigh.
I used the word 'validated' because that's what the host used in the video.
I lived through this era, and it was very common for stores to run the check through the printer like this to endorse it or whatever.
@@timfischer Mostly correct. While this particular model does not include a MICR scanner, some receipt printers of the era did. When a payment by check was tendered, the check would be scanned and the machine would read the magnetic ink that encoded the routing number and account number. Most point-of-sale systems would then perform a lookup against that number to verify that the account was not present on a blacklist of known bad check writers. If it wasn't, the account number and transaction amount was written to a daily ledger for later accounting and till balancing. The printer would then endorse the check for deposit.
Validation is an entirely different financial process, and definitions are important. Not only did I also live through this era, I did this for a living.
@@teebob21Your complaint about the use of the word 'validation' is with the original video, not me. I put it in quotes to show that I was commenting on the video, not using the word properly.
The video claims these printers were used by banks to "validate" the checks. Did you watch it?
@@timfischer Tim, you sure are sensitive. This isn't about you or your misuse of the word, but by all means get in there and act like it's about you.
This brought up massive nostalgia to supermarkets and department stores in the 90's when you first gave the demo. How I have missed this sound. Even in the banks, I think whenever I go into a branch, the deposit receipts are still impact prints, even though I don't think they use the books anymore. I don't have a savings account today but even when I started one as an adult at Fleet in 2004 I didn't have a book then.
Other things that have gone out of fashion are
* Price labels with a magnetic strip on them (they predated barcodes)
* Going back even further tills linked to change machines with all the coins in perspex tubes. I have only seen one picture of them, but they actually had them linked to electromechanical tills in the local supermarket when it opened in the early 1970s and got rid of them when they switched to electronic tills at the end of the 1970s.
@@MrDuncl I don't know if I ever saw a magnetic strip used that way, only for security. I mostly remember cashiers typing in a price or item code or scanning a barcode (with the pleasant chime on a successful scan). Whenever I had to use a numpad and had something fast to type it would always remind me of the cashiers.
@@alextirrellRI I think the magnetic stripe labels were in John Lewis department store. They read them using a wand type thing attached to the cash register. I just did a quick Google and to my surprise you can still buy similar labels from a company called Goldcrest Products. I have no idea what people use them for these days.
@@MrDunclI've mostly seen them being used for security, being too young to remember their usage outside of loss prevention. Though I definitely remember when they used the IBM 4683 with Model 2 dot matrix printers. However, I've always wondered how on earth they got them to work with C&P terminals, given that the system was ancient.
At work we called those types 'carbon papers' NCR paper. We use yellow for the middle copy and pink for the third sheet, and, of course, white for the original.
This sound reminds me of Christmas growing up. Lots of these in Macy's checkout. Magical sound
The power supply connector is actually standard for thermal and impact printers with external power bricks. I can't recall the name but Star Micronics printers even today still use that port if the power brick is external.
I did POS support for 10 years, the check part was also called a Franker. You can still get modern printers such as the Toshiba 2CR. They can even scan an image of the check for electronic processing of checks!
I'm surprised eChecks haven't become mainstream by now.
I knew a guy who bought three different receipt printers or different types and sizes and used to manufacture his own receipts for business-related reimbursement by his employer. He got away with it for years until he submitted a particularly spicy receipt and accounting cross-checked and weren't able to find the fake restaurant he supposedly dined at.
Busted! Great story though))
🎵 " *Cause You Put A Piece Of Carbon Paper Under Your Heart And Gave Me Just A Copy Of Your Love* " 🎵
When I worked at Disneyland, we called printing on the check with the register's printer "franking the check".
In the 90s I worked at a store (UK) which had a similar printer. It would print UK cheques. You slid them up a slope in the front and had to hold them in place until the roller caught them.
It would also fill in old fashioned credit card voucher.
Ha ha, I like the hidden humor in your videos. Love the sound of a dot matrix pounding out those dots. 🎅
Look up the Epson ESC/P printer control language. It uses an "Escape P" character sequence to control printer functions for font, attributes, etc. At [9:30] in the video the word "Epson" dropped the starting letter, possibly getting lost due to the preceding escape control character (27).
ESC/P is a popular printer command language, like HP's PCL or the Postscript PDL (page description language). At work years ago I had to figure out the PCL escape codes to send to a Xerox 4520 printer to have it select an external add-on paper feeder to print on card stock, while regular printouts used the internal paper trays.
I love it. He sees the power cable clearly pulls straight out, so he jerks it back and forth until it submits.
That'll show Tech Tangents who's the boss at end credits printing!!!
Really cool production and very informative. I love your videos as I always learn something. Thank you.
You probably tried it, but sometimes those older devices work on newer machines if you change the parallel port mode in the BIOS to SPP or EPP instead of the default ECP.
You beat me to it, I was going to suggest the same thing.
I wonder if a USB-to-Parallel cable would work on it, allowing newer computers to connect with it.
We love our little PeriPage printer and our kitchen table glass is covering a tons of photos printed on receipt paper
In my first job I used an old Royal typewriter using carbon paper for copies and at the end I was using a PC with a printer.
I love this sound so much. I miss listening to it.
My goodness, this brings back memories of working at a gas station in the early 2000s. Ahhh, to be a teenager again.
I recently started watching a YT channel that has recordings in various stores during the 80s to 00s. I watched a video of a Barnes & Noble in 1997, the sound of the receipts printing and change sloshing in the register, what nostalgia.
As recently as this year (meaning they're very likely still in use) the Pennsylvania State Liquor Stores use receipt printers that use a ribbon, albeit more modern than this one. They even have the validation function, which is used for bar/restaurant orders in-store.
Come to think of it, the main receipt part is probably ribbon-less, but the validation part of it absolutely still uses a ribbon (I've had to replace them).
Most likely the main one is thermal, and a ribbon for checks.
I do like these videos you make where you show unusual or quirky pieces of equipment that everyday people usually don't use. Here's an interesting idea for you, why not try connecting this printer to the VTech IQ Unlimited computer you have. See if you can print a document from that computer to this printer.
This reminds me of the receipt printers I used in the mid 2000’s. The ones we used could print directly onto cheques but instead of a vertical slot, it would take it through a rear feed mechanism on the back that would spit the cheque back out from the front of the printer.
Sounds kinda like NCR.
I had to leave your video and look for the Muppets "Carbon Paper" song! 😂 But I came back. Love it! ❤
That sound!!!! 30 year old memories unlocked!
Thrift/charity shops are still a great find for bargains. I managed to pick up an HP all in one colour laser/scanner/copier for £30 as it was described as not working. All it required was a new security chip on the yellow toner. Nice find on the receipt printer for $15.
Ya gotta be persistent though, there's a lot of cruft to sift through
No such luck around me. There are too many professional ebay hawkers who do this full time, vigilantly scooping out anything of these sorts. Everything is cleaned out by the time regular folks get a chance to even look.
@@oldtwinsna8347 Occasionally I get lucky and find some decent Creative PC speakers or JVC mini-speakers. But there's almost never anything high-end. The closest I got is an Akai tape deck.
That Clay Aiken joke caught me off guard and made me actually laugh. 😂
If you ever get the chance to pick up, one of the small Epson.matrix printers which are used in transport, ( Waybridge) there were a lot of money and they also do carbon copies because each ( Waybridge) ticket has three copies all printed at the same time on carbon paper and I do believe them printers are worth quite a lot of money and still brought brand-new because as you mentioned in this video. Make sure it’s printers can do the carbon copies all at the same time in one pass
I miss the old NCR printers. They had a sound you could always identify them on how they printed.
On a modern machine you can just use the generic text only printer driver pointing to your LPT port or even just pipe a command from CMD to the port "dir > lpt1" works fine.
The sound it made as it first printed the test print brought back memories of going to the bank as a kid in the 80s and 90s.
Reminds me of the high-speed dot-mastrix printers I used at Uni that were connected to the mainframe we had to use.
i believe that same one (or an identical model) is still used at my work, i can always hear it printing in the kitchen. its gray and has micros branding on it so idk if its made by epson or not.
edit: did some research and its actually a TM-U220B model, but they sound the exact same.
I'd forgotten about the bank clerk putting my bankbook in the printer....nice memory of the sound too.
I wish there was a store like this in my area
You find all sorts of cool stuff
I remember upgrading Macy's POS system and loading the firmware for their printers and card readers
It was amazing how much information we had to load on ever reader
I love seeing Epson DOT Matrix printers at CAT Scales at the truck stop.
This is why I love your channel.
Looks like the original Epson TM-U325 was released in 1996 with either a serial or parallel interface, and then they added the USB option later, and kept selling it for many years.
I have installed a ton of these printers, mostly serially interfaced. We have done even more of the TM-U295, the lightweight ticket printer where you insert the ticket on a flatbed and the printer grabs it and prints your data, and the TM-U590 which is the heavy duty ticket printer for doing more than one or two carbon(less) copies on wider tickets. There is a fairly thick manual detailing the escape sequences the printer understands to change fonts and print modes and other operations like opening the cash drawer. These printers are a family and they're all very similar, dating back to the late 1990's. They are still used where multiple copies or print that won't turn black in the Sun are required. Before 1995 or so the standard for this sort of printer was three times bigger, weighed ten pounds, and wasn't half as capable. The Windows drivers for these printers don't work very well and aren't really the way they were designed to be used.
00:45 Yep, that's the test print I remember 😉
Nice find. Regarding the passbooks, the building societies I go to have fancy 24 pin 'Compuprint' branded printers.
That takes me back to shopping at HMV in the 90's, they had noisy receipt printers but they were way slower than your one. Strange about the bold sort of working but not quite. The Epson ESC/P codes these printers used were very universal, I knew most of them by heart having written invoicing software. Maybe there's some settings that will fix that.
A subsequent model that’s still dot matrix is still sold today. It’s used by kitchens mostly, and usb or Ethernet or WiFi. Also, windows xp would also probably be fine with either installing the driver inf manually, or using the generic / plain text driver.
Yes, I was also going to suggest that. The "Generic/Text Only" driver was what we used for the Star receipt printers we had at work until recently.
Huh. I was just talking with my sister about the classic receipt printers the other day. I sure miss them.
Oh yeah, good news related to light bulbs: I found a couple more Philips IQ bulbs at my local resale shop the other day. Two Auto-Off bulbs, seemingly unused, with their packages. Pretty nifty, eh?
I'm not sure if the bank I'm with still has any customers with passbook accounts, but last time I made a deposit in my local branch, I was given a receipt printed on that carbonless paper and printed on a validation printer. This was about 6 months ago.
0:57 anyone who has ever worked food service is immediately triggered by that sound