I'm pretty sure we had commercial/consumer dot-matrix printers in 1981. Something like that would have been much lighter and lower-power than a drum line printer.
> And when shuttle was developed, printers barely existed. Both inkjet and laser desktop printers were introduced commercially 1-3 years before the shuttles first flight in 1981, and weren’t very reliable yet. Desktop printers still aren’t as reliable as a teletype or dot matrix printer. There’s a reason airlines use dot matrix for printing flight manifests at the gate.
Ink plotters, teleprinters, and fax machines ruled the world. But plotters are dreadfully slow at writing text. Radio fax machines may have been viable if they were rugged enough. But they probably weighed as much as the teletype and were much slower - only real advantage is printing diagrams and photos.
In 1981, maybe, but there's a long time lag between design and flight for spacecraft. Cheap/light/sturdy dot matrix printers weren't yet available in the 1970s when the Shuttle was being designed. Nor had the idea of using commercial/off-the-shelf (COTS) components yet taken root. That would come years after the STS was already built and in service.
Fair point. But not so "last minute" that a pre-existing military design couldn't be investigated and reworked, custom print heads cast, etc. That puts it back to...what? 1979 or 1980? In that era, "let's build it to our exacting specifications, high tolerances, and unique mission requirements" pervaded NASA / aerospace engineering and procurement. However much we admire it today, COTS was not their way, and wouldn't be for at least another decade.
Not sure what part of a dot-matrix required gravity to work; the tractor feeds for the paper (if they used that sort), and nothing in the print mechanism requires a "down" other than possibly paper "exhaust" collection?
And imagine how cool that matrix printer sound would be ringing out against the walls of the shuttle in space. Cyberpunk as hell. I miss dot matrix printers so much.
A line printer sounds nothing like a dot matrix printer. They're much, much louder, and it's a continuous buzzing noise, like a chainsaw. Also, the output appears at a similar speed to a dot matrix doing a form feed.
While the sound of a dot matrix printer can be kind of therapeutic - I remember debugging by printing, where the sound of printing and the time waiting could be used to mentally debug the problem, so you almost knew where the bug was without even looking at the print out, a line printer is the complete opposite as it's so loud it's distracting and the output gets spat out so quickly you don't have much, if any thinking time!
Probably not a concern in federal acquisition, but it's an interesting point that Centronics pretty much only built the print head and control electronics. The rest was built by Brother in Japan, as a modification of their electronic typewriter mechanism. Printing really was a very Japan-dominated industry at the time.
Brother's relationship with Centronics fell apart pretty much one model later, and now Brother is the printer company and Centronics is long gone.
There's more to the story of the Centronics printer connector. Centronics was a subsidiary of Wang Laboratories, producer of Wang word processors and computers. They had 20,000 surplus connectors from one of their earlier calculator products, so they reused the connectors for their printers, creating a de facto standard.
An Wang was one of the inventors of core memory (it's complicated). He sold his core memory patent to IBM and used the money to create Wang Laboratories, eventually becoming a billionaire.
