{"id":813,"date":"2011-10-24T11:08:12","date_gmt":"2011-10-24T16:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=813"},"modified":"2011-10-24T12:09:28","modified_gmt":"2011-10-24T17:09:28","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-the-daisy-wheel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/813\/retro-scan-of-the-week-the-daisy-wheel","title":{"rendered":"<span id=\"retro_color\">[ Retro Scan of the Week ]<\/span> The Daisy Wheel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/daisywheel_large.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/daisywheel_small.jpg\" alt=\"Scan of a Daisy Wheel Printer Font Wheel\" class=\"centered\"\/><\/a><span class=\"freecaption\"><em>Text in bloom.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an interesting piece of obsolete technology &#8212; a plastic Lanier daisy wheel for a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daisy_wheel\" target=\"_blank\">daisy wheel printer<\/a>.  Its actual size is about three inches in diameter.<\/p>\n<p>There was a time when having a &#8220;letter quality&#8221; impact printer meant that the machine printed text using pre-formed, typewriter-like type elements.  Some printers held these elements in the shape of a cylinder or a sphere, but in the case of the daisy wheel printer, the character forms projected from a central wheel in a shape that resembled a daisy flower.<\/p>\n<p>Daisy wheel printers produced text by rotating the wheel to the proper character spoke and striking the back of it against an ink ribbon, which would leave a mark on the underlying paper.<\/p>\n<p>Each daisy wheel rendered a different font (or type size), and thus fonts could be changed as easily as replacing one wheel with another.  In this case, you&#8217;re looking at a wheel for the font called &#8220;Prestige Elite 12,&#8221; but printer makers sold dozens of other font wheels, such as those for Courier 10 or Cubic 15.<\/p>\n<p>The daisy wheel method reproduced fonts using a dramatically different technique than, say, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dot-matrix_printer\" target=\"_blank\">dot-matrix printers<\/a>, which used a single matrix of metal pins to form various characters.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Laser_printer\" target=\"_blank\">Laser<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ink_jet\" target=\"_blank\">inkjet<\/a> printers, which produce much less noise and use software-based fonts, made impact printers thoroughly obsolete for every-day PC use by the late 1980s (though stragglers used dot-matrix printers well into the mid-1990s due to lower prices).  Even so, impact printers still reign supreme in specialized applications that require physical force, such as document reproduction via carbon copy paper.<\/p>\n<p><center><em>[ Scan of Lanier daisy wheel, circa 1978 ]<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n<p><strong>Discussion Topic of the Week:<\/strong> Have you ever used a daisy wheel printer?  Tell us about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Text in bloom. Here&#8217;s an interesting piece of obsolete technology &#8212; a plastic Lanier daisy wheel for a daisy wheel printer. Its actual size is about three inches in diameter. There was a time when having a &#8220;letter quality&#8221; impact printer meant that the machine printed text using pre-formed, typewriter-like type elements. Some printers held [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,16,27,26,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-info-and-history","category-computer-design","category-regular_features","category-retro-scan-of-the-week","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}