Daisy Wheel Printer Operation
These may still turn up at yard sales and flea
markets but have virtually disappeared due to slow speed and limited
flexibility with respect to graphics. In their defense, for basic
text, their quality is superb for a low cost printer.
Instead of pins, these use a wheel with all the
possible characters molded on 'leaves' around the perimeter. The
wheel spins to the correct character position and a hammer than
taps the leaf to impress the character (via a ribbon) on the paper.
Carriage and printhead movement is similar to that of dot matrix
printers.
(From: Peter (hedgieus@yahoo.com).)
Some history/trivia:
The daisy wheel printer (interestingly) was patented
before World War II! It was GE or a GE engineer, but only commercialized
by Diablo, which was later bought by Xerox in its expansion to California.
Later spinoff was Qume, and then lot of companies got into it, some
Japanese, some local (California). Daisy wheel technology was killed
by the laser printer becoming cheap and having better quality. Original
impetus for it was speed: IBM Selectric was able to print at 10
char/s (good for 110 baud modems!). It moved the whole ball (big
inertia). Daisy wheel only moves one spoke, (to print one character)
and got 30 chars/s.
Near the end of the era, 'on the fly' printers
got as fast as 80 char/sec.
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