1980 Apple silentype printer

[krye]

I scored this guy for only $60 bucks on eBay. I've seen them go for as high as $200-ish.



It does have some signs of age, but in surprisingly good condition for a 32-year old printer. It even still has a roll of paper in it as well as the paper roll holders. That has to be a bonus.



Unfortunately, I don’t have an interface card to test it. So I don't know if it even works. Not that I’m too worried about it. I have no intention of using it; it’s just nice to know I have one.

I didn't realize how small the silentype really was. It's surprisingly small compared to my Apple Scribe.

 

[uniserver]

was this thermal?

 

[bibilit]

very nice,

Probably among the only printers i will be pleased to collect is the Silentype and the Apple Stylewriter Portable printer (already have the Color Stylewriter 2200)

http://macgui.com/gallery/showphoto.php?pic_id=1666

All are cute and compact.

 

[uniserver]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Silentype

ya know what?

Those guys that worked for apple were amazing. At the time they were making things happen that were completely custom/ that required out-of-the-box thinking, for apple.

Apple was very lucky to have these Guy's.

It is mechanically identical to Trendcom's Model 200, except for the Apple logo in the lower left corner of the front cover,[3] but the internal digital board was completely redesigned by Apple, removing the relatively expensive microprocessor and memory chips, relying on software in the Apple II instead

Obviously the Apple II was powerful enough at the time to run this printer with software, witch i am assuming the Trendcom's Model 200 version of this was serial/standalone.

Ah "software" controlled, Reminds me of the wonderful days of the LTWINMODEM :-D and ISP Technical Support :-D

 

[krye]

Yes, it's thermal.

 

[Gorgonops]

Obviously the Apple II was powerful enough at the time to run this printer with software

Considering the fact that the CPU in your typical dot matrix printer will be the cheapest and weakest 8 bit MCU the manufacturer can find I'm not sure that's much to crow about.

(A typical full-featured Centronics printer of the same period would use something like an Intel 8049, a device best known for living inside IBM PC keyboards. The Epson MX-80 used a low-clocked 8085, a more-integrated and easier to use descendant of the 8080 inside the 1975 Altair 8800.)

It does stand out as a very typical example of Apple's brand of engineering at the time, IE, rip all the brains out of a peripheral, substitute a dollar's worth of hardware and some beautifully handcrafted (read "really ugly") 6502 code, and charge roughly what the peripheral would have cost with the brain still in it. Step 3: Profit!

(With Apple being the only pre-1980 computer manufacturer still in the fight I don't suppose you can argue with the success of that strategy.)

 

[markyb86]

You have to admit those chips weren't worth just a dollar at the time, though.

 

[redrouteone]

I'm thinking the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi would be prefect to drive this. On the plus side you'd have enough horsepower left over to ran an Apple II emulator on it.