How China's 1980s PC Industry Hacked Dot-Matrix Printers (fastcompany.com) 99
An anonymous reader shares a report: Commercial dot-matrix printing was yet another arena in which the needs of Chinese character I/O were not accounted for. This is witnessed most clearly in the then-dominant configuration of printer heads -- specifically the 9-pin printer heads found in mass-manufactured dot-matrix printers during the 1970s. Using nine pins, these early dot-matrix printers were able to produce low-resolution Latin alphabet bitmaps with just one pass of the printer head. The choice of nine pins, in other words, was "tuned" to the needs of Latin alphabetic script.
These same printer heads were incapable of printing low-resolution Chinese character bitmaps using anything less than two full passes of the printer head, one below the other. Two-pass printing dramatically increased the time needed to print Chinese as compared to English, however, and introduced graphical inaccuracies, whether due to inconsistencies in the advancement of the platen or uneven ink registration (that is, characters with differing ink densities on their upper and lower halves).
Compounding these problems, Chinese characters printed in this way were twice the height of English words. This created comically distorted printouts in which English words appeared austere and economical, while Chinese characters appeared grotesquely oversized. Not only did this waste paper, but it left Chinese-language documents looking something like large-print children's books. When consumers in the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) world began to import Western-manufactured dot-matrix printers, then, they faced yet another facet of Latin alphabetic bias.
These same printer heads were incapable of printing low-resolution Chinese character bitmaps using anything less than two full passes of the printer head, one below the other. Two-pass printing dramatically increased the time needed to print Chinese as compared to English, however, and introduced graphical inaccuracies, whether due to inconsistencies in the advancement of the platen or uneven ink registration (that is, characters with differing ink densities on their upper and lower halves).
Compounding these problems, Chinese characters printed in this way were twice the height of English words. This created comically distorted printouts in which English words appeared austere and economical, while Chinese characters appeared grotesquely oversized. Not only did this waste paper, but it left Chinese-language documents looking something like large-print children's books. When consumers in the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) world began to import Western-manufactured dot-matrix printers, then, they faced yet another facet of Latin alphabetic bias.
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More than thousands. More than 50,000, in fact.
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Re: scribbles and hieroglyphics (Score:1)
Depends on what you consider. A word can be a character, but most characters are actually compounds of various other base characters. So depending on what you need, if you have a fixed letterpress such as the early daisy wheel that makes printing a lot more complicated.
Re:scribbles and hieroglyphics (Score:5, Informative)
From what I understand, 8,000 is enough to be able to read the typical newspaper or other common media, and dictionaries generally have about 20,000, but the total is over 50,000.
One would generally want a printer to be able to print anything in one's language.
Dot matrix printers, of course, were considerably simpler than Chinese typewriters [wikipedia.org] that preceded them.
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Chinese Wheel of Fortune (Score:1)
Summary forgot to mention How (Score:5, Informative)
TLDR: They did a half pixel shift to double the pixel density. (Also some other stuff later on with higher resolution printers. )
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Thanks for the effort ;-)
That's what many of us latin alphabet users did in the eighties to our dot matrix printers to get better print quality, before eventually a new generation of dot matrix printers came that offered half-dot shift "high quality" text modes natively...
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This became known as the 24pin dot matrix printer soon after, no pin shifting needed.
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TLDR: They did a half pixel shift to double the pixel density
Of course, we also used the same "trick" to print graphics.
Huh?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest dotmatrix names I remember are Epson and Okidata, and both are Japanese.. not "Western."
Other than RadioShack / Tandy, who was selling other people's junk labeled as their own -- and IBM / Lexmark, and Tally -- does anyone remember any American / "Western" dotmatrixes?
Man.. people are going nuts trying to find any hint of imagined bias and discrimination these days.
To the eggheads in their ivory towers: In your quest for ideological purity, make sure you don't turn into the very monsters you claim to seek to destroy. I have a nasty feeling that out of this incessant need to be ideologically pure we're going to see someone worse than Hitler and Stalin rise.
Maybe that's what JK Rowling was getting at in Potter?
Re:Huh?! (Score:4, Informative)
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Centronics sure rings a bell but I never saw one in the wild with its own name -- I'm pretty sure they were a source for Tandy's efforts.
Now, I got into this game in the mid-to-late-80's, so if Centronic's heyday under its own name was before that, well -- I missed it.
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My first printer was an Epson MX80 in 1981. It had a parallel port but I don't remember if it was commonly called a "Centronics" port yet. All the computer mags at the time seemed to offer Epson and Gorilla Banana (name still craps me up) dot matrix printers. I don't ever remember seeing a "Centronics" branded printer. Regardless I had to build a serial to parallel converter to use it with my system at the time.
Centronics 737 (Score:2)
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We had a Centronics chain printer. Don't remember a dot matrix, though.
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It didn't claim intentional discrimination, only that early dot-matrix parts and standards didn't work well for Asian characters because they arose in the West first. It didn't say they intentionally discriminated.
> The biggest dotmatrix names I remember are Epson and Okidata, and both are Japanese.. not "Western."
That's not necessarily a contradiction. The article is mostly talking about the state of dot-matrix in the 70's going into the 80's as microcomputer sales took off.
Also, Epson's early products
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Man.. people are going nuts trying to find any hint of imagined bias and discrimination these days.
To the eggheads in their ivory towers: In your quest for ideological purity, make sure you don't turn into the very monsters you claim to seek to destroy. I have a nasty feeling that out of this incessant need to be ideologically pure we're going to see someone worse than Hitler and Stalin rise.
Maybe that's what JK Rowling was getting at in Potter?
What the fuck does any of that have to do with China and dot matrix printers?
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Read the last sentence of the summary. The author implies prejudice against Chinese characters on the part of printer manufacturers.
Re: Huh?! (Score:2)
TigerPlish is one of those accounts that started saying the quiet part out loud after 2016. If you know what I mean.
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If anything, I used to be far more vociferous "back in the day" here.
But over the years, I have less time to dedicate to this cesspit of leftist, liberal thinking. I'm through with the asshats seeing "injustice" and "oppression" everywhere they look. You people simply go with the "cause du jour." 2016 it was Occupy this, 2020 it was BLM, 2022 .. I can't remember, and 2024 is Palestine. Don't you people ever think for yourselves? It feels like there's some outside force telling you what your cause is, w
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Also, I'm sure with your attitude you had absolutely no problem finding all or most of them, like a flame attracts moths.
Generally speaking, when someone is in the position that they might have to wonder "AITA", then the answer is probably "yes". The fact that you attract a lot of negativity probably indicates that you need to do some work on yourself, not that Democrats are assholes (regardless of whether t
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I'm trying to figure out if we're reading this wrong. Sure, the technology is biased towards Western alphabetical writing. It's a hell of a lot easier than Chinese. So perhaps he's not using the word judgmentally, but rather just descriptively.
On the other hand, phrases such as "[...] the perspective of manufacturers who operated under the (likely unconscious) assumption of "A through Z."" sure as hell sou
Re: also (Score:1)
China was pretty bad until the early 2000s when they finally got some economy from western money moving not just their factories there but also the knowledge industry.
China is still pretty bad if youâ(TM)re not in the upper 10% of the Han people. If youâ(TM)re unlucky enough to be born in the wrong population group, you could be legally a slave for the rest of your life even today.
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I suspect multiple authors. One with some statics background, and another doing the final editions. (But not necessarily only two.)
Re: Huh?! (Score:1)
Man.. people are going nuts trying to find any hint of imagined bias and discrimination these days.
Why do you keep doing it then, snowflake?
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The Japanese printer market from the 70s and 80s is interesting. The dot matrix models we got were less popular in Japan, even though they had enough resolution to do Japanese characters reasonably well. A lot of people used plotters instead. The output was much more pleasing and they could do outline graphics too. A pen carousel made colour possible.
Their computers tended to have a fundamentally different design too, due to the need to display complex characters. They usually had separate video memory with
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My first printer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
but also Japan based.
Asian character sets should die (Score:3)
In Chinese, my understanding is that there are tens of thousands of characters and typing is handled by a phonetic system called pinyin... Which is subject to error if you speak a strong regional dialect.
It's crazy. It doesn't have to be Latin, but switching from an ideographic system to an alphabetic one would be much more efficient. With pinyin, they're halfway there anyway.
Presumably Korean and Japanese would similarly benefit.
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Hangul is extremely cool. It's a logically and self-consistently laid out syllabary (not alphabet).
Of course it'll all be moot in 50-100 years when all written communication in any language is emojis. :)
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Hangul is extremely cool. It's a logically and self-consistently laid out syllabary (not alphabet).
Korean hangul is a proper alphabet, with separate, consistent letters for the various consonants and vowels (about 20 each). Japanese has no alphabet, but does have two syllabaries: katakana and hiragana.
To the Western reader, hangul looks like a syllabary, because of its layout. In addition, many modern webpages use it as though it were a syllabary via Unicode's combinatoric representation (see here [gernot-kat...-pages.com] for more information than anyone would really want to know).
The difference is that the hangul glyphs, sepa
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And English should switch to a phonetic spelling system like German and Spanish. yoo go ferst.
The problem is that there are many more homophones in logographic languages (not ideographic, that is something else), so that switching to a phonetic-only system has its issues. That would also break the entire language family for the precise reason you mention - there are a number of dialects that are written with the same characters (logograms) but have different pronunciations for those logograms. We actual
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English is indeed maddeningly inconsistent. And I really wish we had adjectives after nouns in descending order of significance. English speakers are pretty happy to absorb things from other languages where there is something lacking, and we're still recovering from the French running things for a while. .
However, that should correct itself over time... Just a few more centuries or so... Anyway, we won't be held back by the writing system as things evolve.
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English also has some very weird spellings that are there only because a single guy decided that it was the correct one. Ie, the B in "debt", it's never been pronounced, but presumably as I heard it was added because someone wanted to imply that it is related to "debit". The "h" in "ghost" is from Dutch and the dictionary people decided that looked nicer despite having a completely different pronunciation. Of course, Chinese characters have similar oddities, and they're all about rote memorization than l
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There's a big difference between speech and writing, and many languages have significant differences between the spoken and written forms (or so I'm told).
In speech, there is almost always context, and usually a setting and body language to go with it. Hence, speech is often allowed to be way more ambiguous than written language, while still allowing the listener to make sense of it (failure to do so sometimes resulting in humor/tragedy, but it's a small enough proportion that we can tolerate it) In speec
Re: Asian character sets should die (Score:1)
The funny thing is that English used to be a lot more phonetic and have more characters until printing presses came from Germany and movable type kind of coalesced across Europe to 26 characters. Th for example was a single character that Slashdot canâ(TM)t show and morphed into y, hence why ye olde is pronounced âoethe oldâ and thou became you, the extra characters were expensive and you basically were supposed to know the rules when reading a book (similar to modern demonstrations where you
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Japanese has an alphabet. In fact it has two including a dedicated one for adopted words from other languages (Katakana). Both have 46 characters to describe every syllable in the language. As it stands any word written in Kanji (ideograms) can also be written in Hiragana (phonetic alphabet). That said, in practice Kanji is typically used for nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and hiragana is used to structure and tie the sentence together grammatically.
Re: Asian character sets should die (Score:1)
Japanese (non-kanji) isn't an alphabet, the word you're looking for here is syllabary.
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> [China] switching from an ideographic system to an alphabetic one would be much more efficient.
One advantage of the ideographic approach is that the same ideograph usually means the same thing in multiple dialects. A phonetic/alphabetic system would lose this advantage, as the result would be too different per dialect.
Think of the happy face emoji: it means "happy" almost anywhere in the world. Pictures of concepts are more universal.
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The entire purpose of the Chinese writing system was indeed to unify the empire with a common system that was understood by the provinces that had different languages (not just different dialects). As such, it worked quite well. Over time the languages evolved a bit around the writing as well.
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These days, Chinese users, especially younger ones, rely upon text prediction. I wonder how often this leads to either humorous typos. Also wonder if the users will often choose the recommended text that isn't exactly what they wanted just because it is faster that way.
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Presumably Korean and Japanese would similarly benefit
Hangul for Korean; Hiragana for Japanese native words and Katakana for transliterating foreign words. Watch any Japanese video including anime and you'll see either Latin characters being input then corverted to Hiragana automagically or Hiragana directly, followed by automagic conversion to Kanji. Korean is kinda similar except no kanji. I still don't understand the Chinese input methods, though (other than those touch pads that can take handwritten glyphs directly into a computer instead of a keyboard).
Efficiency bias (Score:3)
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Besides just the difficulty of making a finer-pitch print head you also have memory concerns. How big of a character ROM do you need for Chinese?
(I'm going to assume 8 pins instead of 9, just for ease of calculation.)
ASCII has 96 printable symbols. Each symbol takes an 8x7 bitmap, or 7 bytes. 7 * 96 = 672 bytes. Add a few extra code pages in there for non-ASCII characters and your character ROM is a few kilobytes.
Chinese characters need twice the resolution in both dimensions, so a 16x14 bitmap. 28
Epson (Score:5, Informative)
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Centronics (Score:2)
I recall a tale from the early days of the automotive industry.
Cadillac was being given condescending advice from European makers about what they were doing wrong, and why the domestics were outselling them.
What they were *missing* was that while Cadillac's sales there were comparable, but lower, than the locals, the euro market was pretty much an afterthought for Cadillac, something like 10% of its own domestic sales.
That is, the smaller foreign market, while worth shipping to, was not worth designing for.
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The issue of the day wasn't the lack of market share, the Epson MX-80 (sold as MP-80) was the most popular printer in Japan, and the Japanese Kanji overlaps partially with simplified Chinese. The issue was the size of the character set. There was no unicode back then. Character sets were limited. As it stood the JIS 128 ( JIS X 0201) was only a slight extension of the 128 character ASCII table and tried to keep compatibility which was important for a printer like the MX-80 / MP-80 which was multi-market. Th
Re:Epson ... olivatta thermal too then (Score:2)
Re:Epson ... olivatta thermal too then
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Katakana is much easier to render than Kanji with a 9-pin print head. Printing Kanji was probably easier to implement for their FX-80. I had one at the time with an additional board that printed high-resolution ASCII in 2 passes. It printed like how the article described the Chinese hacked 9-pin dot matrix printers.
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The FX-80 didn't print Kanji or Hiragana for the same reason the MX-80 didn't: supporting it would have made it incompatible with the ASCII character set. Those were wild-west days of getting dots on pieces of paper, especially in Japan. Here's a diagram showing the character sets which applied to Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Releasing a printer which was incompatible with much of the software of the day was a non-starter.
Shifting up by 1/216" is hacking now? (Score:5, Informative)
Shifting the paper up by half (or even a third) the dot spacing and making a second pass was something 9-pin printers did from the early 80s. When combined with epson graphics escape codes, you could get 216 dpi vertically and 240 dpi horizontally if I remember right. This was very common. There was even a TSR that made any epson-compatible printer do near-letter quality printing using this technique. It was called Lettrix. Pretty neat, albeit slow.
By the time I was in college, many MS-DOS programs had their own built-in high resolution printing routines for old 9-pin printers using two or even three passes. I remember WordPerfect 6 for DOS did this but their print subsystem at this time was geared more for page printers, so it ended up printing in a very inefficient way on my Epson 9-pin printer, moving the print head in a redundant way. I wrote a program that would render the raw graphics output into a buffer, and then created optimized epson graphics escape sequences to avoid the unnecessary head moves, and use the 1/216th shift to get the full resolution. Fond memories.
I've always been a bit in awe of how the Japanese managed to get computers to deal with a much more complicated system of writing than Latin languages. So it's no surprise that some enterprising chinese geeks made printers work with their own script.
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A friend and I wrote a program to do graphics on the dot matrix printer at school (a big ass machine meant for the entire class, pre-Epson days). We reverse engineered the encoding used to control the pins and now we could have it draw cartoons. The other guy went one to have a full career starting a computer graphical design company; I went on to a career of fixing other people's bugs...
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9 pin printers offered this out of the box (Score:3)
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Ha, I remember reading some conference papers from the early 1980s, and some of the papers were obviously from a dot matrix, including figures and diagrams. It seemed to cheap and low quality, but the conference likely didn't have a big budget. At our university, before the days of laser printers, there was a very expensive high resolution typographic printer using special paper to get proofs that could be sent off to journals.
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I remember Near-Letter-Quality print mode was not too bad. Usually just a slower double pass. Then we got a 24-pin printer and it could do NLQ in one pass (just slower than draft mode). We thought that was spiffy. A friend of mine bought a color dot matrix printer. With four colors it could do color images. We thought that was pretty nifty, but cumbersome in practice.
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Came here for this.
Some time in the 90s, maybe 1994? I picked up obsolete kit for cheap so I could get a computer I could afford. At one point I scored a 9 pin colour dot matrix. That definitely could do 1/3 dot step to do 3 passes per line and it was already obsolete enough for me to get, for free if I recall correctly.
I don't remember the model, so I have no idea, but I think micro stepping was available reasonably early on. Maybe not right at the beginning when the article talks about.
Also, with 4 colour
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Brother, let me preach...
OKOKOK, so I followed the advice here from the annoying Brother fanbois and... became an annoying Brother fanboi.
I bought a Brother 3170CDW (now discontinued). The new model of the same is about £200 or so. Even the guy in the printer shop seemed a bit surprised since there were somewhat cheaper options, especially given the price of the official toner.
But you know what? Glad I did. It prints every time. It's freaky TBH. Also, you can indefinitely reset the cartridges. T
Novel Concept (Score:2)
Develop a machine to do your work, vs develop a machine you don't need that will work for someone else.
'Latin Alphabetic Bias' (Score:2)
Re: 'Latin Alphabetic Bias' (Score:2)
Sounds like a chinese shill doesnt he. China were free to invent their own tech, in fact how come the nirvana of Moas peoples republic didnt manage it?
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From that phrase I suspected he had a statistical background.
Inaccuate (Score:3)
>> Two-pass printing dramatically increased the time needed to print Chinese as compared to English
This is not necessarily true. Each Chinese character is more-or-less a whole word versus English requiring multiple letters for each word.
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No only that, starting in the early 80s, two-pass printing was common in the latin world as well, as that's how you got "near-letter quality" printing on 9-pin printers.
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> Each Chinese character is more-or-less a whole word versus English
I'd say the ratio is more like 1.5 characters per English word. More complex or less common words usually take 2 characters.
By the way, ever notice Spanish translations of English are about 30% longer? Maybe their clean phonetics comes at a price?
If you think that bias is bad (Score:2)
the entire prosthetics industry is biased against us so-called "normal people who don't need prosthetics". We need several prosthetic middle fingers to properly express our opinion of people who find bigotry in low-res printers that print in low res.
I prefer this music hack ... (Score:3)
Alice: What instrument do you play?
Bob: Dot matrix printer.
Alice: Surely, you jest?
Bob: Eye of the Tiger [youtube.com]
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as cool as that was, it pales in comparison with the older tricks playing tunes on an AM radio, or racing hard drives across the lab floor . . .
Is faux outrage necessary? (Score:2)
So, they use bias on three occasions to describe the fact that a system was not designed to accommodate Chinese requirements, which on even a minor technical analysis of the problem, are quite different.
computing technology has been biased in favor of certain alphabetic scripts—none more so than the Latin alphabet.
You mean it was designed to print Latin alphabet characters, and not Kanji or Chinese characters, which are a lot more complicated and diverse.
But my favourite.
The Latin alphabetic bias of impact printing, Yeh found, was baked into the very metallurgical properties of printer components themselves.
Even the metal was biased! The world hates China (and Japan, but the Chinese are mostly specialising in being outraged at the moment).
An interesting
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Well that escalated quickly (Score:2)
In the space of a few paragraphs we went from a potentially interesting dive into how a technology designed for one use case was adapted to a completely different one, to a not-so-veiled accusation that early dot-matrix printers (and their designers) were racist. Which is rich, considering many of the Asian countries being talked about here are *so* racist it's hard for many Westerners to even comprehend how severely racist those cultures are.
But hey, apparently designing a 1980s dot matrix printer for main