12 Jan
1999
12 Jan
'99
3:33 a.m.
> > By the time I was in high school dittos were
a distant memory. To put it
> > in (classiccmp) perspective, by that time inkjets were still on the
> > horizon and dot matrix printers were still the shit.
> Of what time you are talking ? In 1979 I had to
do some
> maintenance for ink jet printers - 4 weeks in a small
> room between spare parts and nothing else to do but
> adjustind ink timing and cleaning these bloody heads.
> Ink jet was in fact already in wide use at this time -
> for example all teminal systems in the tax office here
> in Munich where equipped with ink jet printers as hard
> copy/form printing devices.
When I entered high school in 1987 InkJet printers
were just hitting the
mass consumer market. My memory could be wrong however. But I don't
remember anything other than fast dot matrix printers being all the rage
then. To have an ImageWriter II at that time was a very cool thing.
No, your memory is still ok (At least we have a similar
bit failiure :) - In the mass market, ink jet printers
occured around the late 80s, while they have been on the
PC market since early 80s, but at inacceptable prices,
and thy have been around since the mid 70s.
If Xerox is big in not marketing PARC ideas, SIEMENS
has at least the same attitude about some developments.
They invent _great_ pices of hardware, somtimes years
ahead, but sell them only for a very special purpose,
an always miss the mass market. The ink printer technology
was developed thru the 70s until a stage where it could
work reliable (even when handled by a tax clerk :). They
have been twice to four times faster than any dot matrix
printer (at this time) with an comperable quality. SIEMENS
sold 'big' nubers of ink printers as hard copy / remote
printing stations, but they completly ignored the upcomming
PC/small business market until 1985, to come up with a
new generation (different interfaces, from SS97 and RS432
to RS232, paralell and even C64 serial), still a good
printer, but now inferior to already available 9 and more
pin NLQ printers (at a much lower price) ...
Similar for laser Printers - SIEMENS still holds som
70% of the big laser printer market worldwide (direct
or thru OEM), but they never managed to come up with
a desktop unit (CC-fact: they used DEC PDP processors
for the print controll :).
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK