Love to see you caring about all these animals! LA50: the printer of "my dreams". My father worked for DEC in the 80s/90s as technician and printed all his reports at the evening at the home office on such a device. I often felt asleep with the sound of the needles, two doors away from the office. A noise, I will never forget and never hated. It more gave me the feeling "there is anybody taking care about you".

The second I saw that, my fingers instantly went into muscle memory to operate the thing, remove lid and change paper,, reassemble and hit the go button. I used and serviced these a LOT in the 80s. Fun fact, it's the same mech as used by the Apple printer that matched the Lisa, made by C.Itoh as the 8510.

David poking the LF and FF buttons and nothing happens; all the old guys shouting at the telly “Take the printer offline!”. Those printers were built like the proverbial outhouse and will quite probably outlast you.

I had this setup in 1985 in business school. I remember a magazine review article saying "If you prefer all your equipment to be from one vendor you are in luck because the only driver that Lotus 123 provides for a Dec Rainbow is for a DEC LA50 printer". See, it's a FEATURE!!!. Oh and the next time you have the cover off the rainbow, notice that you can rotate the square logo panel next to the power switch for when you stand the computer on end in "tower" configuration. Some engineer must have been really proud of that. I also drilled a little hole in the filler panel for the second drive bay so that the hard disk's activity light could be seen. Real hacker stuff there.

I worked at a place that used VT220's, VT320's, DEC LA50's, and some Okidata Microline printers. The main office had a VAX server using the VMS OS. They used that system from the 80's until they sold the company in 2009.

My first computer was a DEC -Pro 350 which included a LA-50 printer. Your video really brought back pleasant memories. I still feel that the DEC Pro 30 was one of the best-engineered PC of its day. Their mistake was keeping the operating system proprietary. To this day my alias is DECPRO350. Take care of this historic computer.

When I worked as a printer repair tech. I was told never to use wet lubricant on the print head bar. You'll get dust from the paper and the ribbon settle on the print head bars. This will gum up the bronze bearings on the print head sled.and cause the print head to seize.

Great printer! Speaking as former DEC employee, when we built solid, we built solid! Best wishes for both yours bunnies and cats. A few years ago we tried rescuing a baby wild rabbit from a neighbor's dog, sadly without success. Meanwhile our 14 year old cat has a UTI, be she seems to be responding well to the antibiotics. Keep those bunnies and DEC gear alive and running!

Looks like (another) version of the C. Itoh 8510. Several PC manufacturers had their own versions (e.g. Apple with the DMP). I had the parallel version as a kid; nice reliable printer.

My first job in computer tech was doing tech support at a college that was in the beginning stages of moving away from mainframes to PCs. Nearly every office had one of those LA50s in them. What a flash-back hearing that thing kick on. Definitely workhorses those old beasts. Great for printing "Happy Birthday" banners! :D Thanks for sharing!

“When in doubt, read the manual.” surely you mean, “When all else fails read the manual.”? I know you love your Centurion, but I’ve always loved the look of DEC products, in the 1990s I was working with Micro VAX IIs & Alphas, VT terminals and a DEC PC for a couple of years! Dot matrix printer, now there’s a sound I gladly haven’t heard in a while. Sadly haven’t heard the sound of the DEC keyboard for a while. Love the care you put into your animals, even farm bunnies.

5:20 What I love about this shot is that it really shows the final merging (and death) of the old tech with the new tech of the day. The final reminiscent of a typewriter being engulfed with computer controlled steppers, logic, and printhead. It's such a work of art to look at in 2024. Just look at that platen and bail bar! Beautiful.

Flashbacks to boxes of fan paper and being the only kid with pie charts in his book report … good luck bunz!

My wife broke down in tears of laughter when you said "It works if you just reacharound and hit"... Made me blush. Fun project. First thing I ever wrote was a printer auto wrapping formatter for an 086 PRN output. Good times.

Us mammals gotta stick together. The world needs more people like you.

Been years, but I think the 'COM' port on the printer was so it could be tied to a modem (which is why maybe it was set for 2400 bps). That port would have pinout for DTE ('Data Terminal Equipment') instead of DCE ('Data Communication Equipment'). Early days, DTE/DCE was widely considered the 'proper' way to wire. Later we just ended up throwing a 'null modem' between things when you needed to rewire.

I have an LA75 sheet feeder attachment. Those seem to be extremely rare. I’ve never seen a sheet feeder attachment for the LA50. I do remember some students in college feeding single sheets one at a time to print college papers off the PDP 11/70 mainframe using a program called Runoff. We would use a regular text editor like EDIT or TECO and incorporate the dot “.” commands for formatting information. On the Rainbow (much later) there were some more advanced word processing programs. Our Rainbow at a place I worked had a DEC Daisy Wheel Printer attached for letter quality output. The LA75 had several print speeds with the fastest being bare dot matrix and the slower being called near letter quality. There were some escape codes that would work on the LA50 to do the same thing.

I was busy today with a 10th birthday party for a great grandson so I didn't get my view in until evening. I see 22,556 views. For a technical channel that is outstanding. Your printer project had no dragons to slay, but you have been fighting other dragons this week with your critters. That's a sign that your are human. Back in the 1980s I had a similar printer. That is, all the dot matrix printers were similar. Mine was a different brand and I have no clue which it might have been. Seeing that barberpole test print was a blast from the past for me. Next week I will expect two dragons slayed! Keep up the good work and take care of family and critters, too.

Man, this takes me back. I worked for DEC for 16-17 years. Maynard (PDP-10), Merrimack(Product Marketing), Pensacola (Sales), back to Merrimack (Marketing), Marlboro (Software Engineering), and the to Dallas (Sales Support). Laid off in 1994.

This is like seeing an old friend. Long ago I had picked up three of these, bought from a fellow who had got a whole palate of them at an auction in Albuquerque. They are Japanese in origin, made by C.Itoh company. Same basic unit as the C.Itoh Prowriter. In fact, many of the parts interchange. I had bought one as a parts unit for the Prowriter. Main difference was the Prowriter has a Centronics interface, the LA50 is serial. The firmware is different as well. The LA50 was so versatile, made cables that allowed it to tap into any serial data stream and print whatever was coming down the line when toggled on.

I love that you care about animals ❤

Ah, dot matrix printers. Growing up, we had an Imagewriter II attached to our Apple ][c+. Noisy little thing, but nowhere near as ear piercingly loud as the high speed wide carriage daisy wheel we had attached to an IBM XT. The Imagewriter II was noisy, but you could still be in the room with it running. The daisy wheel, that one you'd start the job, leave the room and close the door! LOL Do hope your critters get well soon!

Hands up if you have printed outside the paper on the self test on a LA50. 🖐

Lithium grease is the standard lube for printhead rails, so you guessed right! You can recondition the roller by 'scrubbing' it with a rag & acetone (nail polish remover or laquer thinner work fine). IMPORTANT! You need to take out the roller to work on it, because acetone will ruin plastic parts! I have reconditioned rollers in situ when it's been impractical to remove them, but you have to be extremely careful.

It's been SO long since I had a dot matrix printer, but I do remember that you do need to have the printer offline for the line / form feed buttons to respond. :)

that printhead noise takes me right back to elementary school, i can almost smell the hot print head.

I can't help but think about Watership Down, hearing about your recent cat/rabbit engagement. I really appreciate your love of animals and that you share it on your channel. The ones you're caring for are lucky to have been found by such thoughtful and gentle humans.

When we got a Laser (brand) 286 in 1990, we also got a Canon bubble jet printer (yes BJ-300/330?) alongside the 286 and it was awesome. That printer was relatively silent and much, much faster. I’m really happy I never had to endure a dot-matrix at home.

Thankyou for caring for the animals.

The printer looks just like an Apple Dot Matrix Printer (aka the DMP; "Dot Matrix Printer" was literally the name of the printer, not just a generic description), which itself was a rebadged C.Itoh 8510. The DMP (and, I believe, the 8510) was a parallel printer. Apple later released the original ImageWriter, which had a different exterior but the innards were still the same or at least substantially similar, although the ImageWriter was a serial printer. Even later Apple produced the ImageWriter II, which had a completely different form factor and an updated mechanism. Other than perhaps a few Apple-specific control codes (e.g., the color codes for the IWII), I believe they all used compatible control codes.

When you say DEC LAxxx I’m transported back to my undergrad days at McGill in the early ‘80s. MUSIC crew represent! (Decwriter)

Late reaction, but I really love you taking care of and loving and worrying over all these animals. Don't let it crawl under your skin man. Everything you do with love for an animal will never be wasted energy!

That is the face of a man who is passionate about his dot matrix printer.

I remember when my previous dog needed surgery. He insisted on going for a walk in the snow. His cone scooped it up like a plow. The face full of snow didn't stop him though.

Hope the bunnies survive. I know how difficult it can be to care for newborn animals. I manage to give milk to six dogs aged 2 days for 3/4 weeks (their mother couldn't give them milk due to medication), they had to eat every few hours, including by night. I had to stimulate their genitals so they could poop and pee. I had to keep them warm. I had to be their mother. After starting solid food (at about 1 month old), the work got more bearable for me. They could pee and poop by themselves, so I just had to clean them. They did not need to eat by night at this age. None of them died :) They are now 10 years old and are like sons to me. I'm glad I didn't give up.

Like many others, your favourite printer is a printer that actually works

A clear acrylic printer stand would be a neat period addition. It's basically a box with open front and back. The paper goes into the box, the printer sits on top.

DEC produced great hardware (and software). I used to work and maintain lots of LA75 and LA30N printers - the only problem they had I when the main rod that the print head was moving on was getting dirty from the paper fibers. I also worked the the LG15 matrix printer - large printers that was later on produced by Printronix. Good to see those printers still working !

Mounting the printer above the computer has me thinking: You can start writing Strong Bad Emails ending each with "E-mail StrongBad," "Preeeow World" or "The end."

I love to see the animal content on this channel, as well as the vintage computing. Hope the little rabbits make it, keep us updated!

The number of times I have been hanging upside down behind desks fitting in cables , sometimes they were the right ones , always dusty ,and my knees are shot now

The Ready Switch is because this printers were normally controlled by a spooler in a multi user envoironment. While you do some work on the printer like changing the colour tape or the paper, you make shure no job is executed, and the spooler stores the jobs until you are ready and press ready 🙂

It's really nice to hear that sound of a printer coming back to life.

Back around 1980, I updated by small legal office into the new age of personal computing. Being pre-laser printer, we printed on dot-matrix printers like this one. I had a small one, name forgotten, for personal use, but the "big gun" was made by NEC. It was large, fast, and robust beyond any expectation. It also screamed when it printed. It was so loud that we put it and its computer in a separate, sound insulated room. Even then, its noise was intrusive through most of the office. I think I still have it stored in my basement, why I could not say.

Glad the critters are mostly OK. Just two pups here and sometimes it's been hard to keep up with their health issues. My friend worked at an auto parts warehouse that used LA50s to print pick lists for customer orders. They ran something like 16 hours a day printing 3 part carbon paper forms. They were monsters. He snagged one for me when one of them had a problem the tech couldn't fix in 5 minutes (they just put a new one in service.) I fixed mine in about 20 minutes; new caps in the power supply (whod'a thunk?) and used it for a couple more years. Still out in the garage somewhere.

I’m pretty sure I have used this model. If I’m not mistaken we had a bunch them at my uni back in late ‘80es. Very reliable, very simple. I had a similarly simple printer myself which was lost in my very many moves and I now have an irrational desire for a matrix printer.

I worked on a variety of dot matrix printers in the 80's. I'm not surprised that printer was made in Japan, the printers I worked on were mostly NEC and Qume, with one or two Centronics as well. The NEC 5500 (memory could be faulting me) had a lot of issues with bad duel op-amp chips, otherwise it was a pretty good printer. Later Okidata was the king, and we sold a lot of those. I replaced so many printheads with those printers. Many I serviced were in almost constant use, printing 3 part shipping orders forms.

Back in the day I hated serial printers with a passion. Parallel was so much simpler. I never worked much with DEC dot matrix, mostly in the early 90's I was hooking them up to Tektronix Printers

1200 7n1 most likely means it was connected to an older mainframe. Realistically for most computers prior to about 1984 anything over 1200 baud was a pipe-dream the hardware couldn't actually handle. Likewise the 7 bit with no parity gave a slight (1/9th) speed boost. One also has to remember a lot of older devices only had six bit character spaces, thus requiring either an interchange box to turn it into 7 bit ascii (most of which could NOT handle anything past 1200 baud either) I remember replacing a LA50 at a jobsite in the late '80's with a daisy wheel because they were wasting an entire 5150PC as a middle-man just to turn DEC sixbit into ASCII (praise be the XLAT instruction?) and the older daisy wheen supported that native. Realistically in most cases the parity bit was only needed if you were in a noisy environment, or you were pushing the baud rate past either device or the wire's capabilities. The moment we hit 2400 baud and faster as commonplace that parity bit basically became a "must have" until cable and hardware caught up.. though also a lot of older serial devices couldn't even spare the computational power to calculate a parity bit. There's a reason 8n1 prior to about '83 really wasn't a thing, but afterwards ended up becoming the norm. I even had that issue at home with a Roland plotter (I got from a dumpster dive), where I had a choice of 300 baud at 7E1 or 600 baud at 8n1 trying to get it to talk to my Coco with its funky four pin DIN serial. But all this dicking around with baud rate, parity, and stop bits makes it pretty clear why for printers Centronics parallel ended up the winner. Well, unless you needed to run the cable a couple hundred feet.

Went thru a few dot-matrix printers before I mortgaged my soul for a laser printer (4 figure sum for an Epson GQ3500) but the best one I had was the NEC P2200 24 pin printer. A printer that had a few party tricks; like both push and pull tractor feeds, and being able to sheet-feed whilst the tractor feed paper was still loaded... Still needed to buy headphones whilst using it...

That clear plastic over the dip switches takes me right back to being a 5 year old as the MX-80 printer looked like that inside! I knew those were the forbidden adjustments, but only that. My Dad had the Mx-80 connected to an Atari 800, I remember how loud that little print head was! Very loud!

When doing the shelf above teh rainbow, don't forget to leave space behind (or under) for the box of fan-fold paper and somewhere for it to feed to.

I think it's so charming that a third of the videos on your channel are simply titled 'I Love This [XYZ retro device].' Your enthusiasm is so obvious in every detail. I showed my not-tech-savvy husband the video of the NASA computer (can't remember the name) and even though he didn't understand a single thing about that computer, he loved the video just because you were so excited. Also... isn't it funny how when life gets tough, the first things we forget are the things that make us happy and/or fulfilled? We all need a Mrs Usagi in our lives to remind us of those happy/fulfilling things.

What's cool about this is you can put it on the PDP and VAX as well.

You deserve a win and hopefully you caught a break with all the animals living with you. Keep it up, man. 🙂

I worked a lot with these printers in the early 1990s. By then I always had a box of adapters for printers and terminals with 9 and 25 pins as the cabling itself was with done with RJ-45 like cables.

Printers... My first proper job was VAX-operator. There was that enormous Mannesmann Tally MT660. It's been 24 years since those times, but I still remember the different types of forms and their alignments on MT660. The device was rather loud :D

Hooray for the wins! Love seeing the furbabies doing better! This videos has inspired me to dust off my old IBM printer and see if it still lives.

this channel is genuinely cool, i love the fact your breathing life into all this gear that i'd love to use but probably never see. just the knowledge needed to keep these things working its mind blowing to me. can't imagine some people being able to find a manual nowadays, let alone learn the manual from cover to cover. great content

Very cool printer, and I'm so glad to hear the bunnies are starting to get better! 🐇

Reminds me of our first printer when I was a kid. Loved watching that noisy chungus make its obnoxious noises!

Bunnies...I was mowing the lawn with a tractor a couple years ago and happened to see some grass flapping around a bit ahead of the tractor. On stopping for a look, I uncovered a little depression with baby bunnies in it! Boy...if I had gone over that with the mower....I cut a wide swath around that spot and a week later they were gone. Dunno if they left on their own or a wild critter got them.

So sorry to hear about the issue with the bunnies but so glad to hear they're on the mend. Awesome video about this great little retro printer. When you grow up with dot matrix printers, you'll never outgrow the thrill of what memories the printing sound evokes.

I love the sounds of dot matrix printers!! Music to my ears

I love your passion for animals as much as your passion for the old computers, dude.

All my blessings to your little ones! What a fun little printer that is! I love printers, they're like a weird subsection of computing history. I'm always happy to learn more about them! Thanks!

One of my favorite parts of every video is at the very end where you show one of your pets. It's better that you care for your animals than to make another video. We can wait.

Printer above the monitor, like Strong Bad.

That sound......i love that sound when printing.

I was shouting to take the printer offline before trying the form/line feed buttons. How I love the sound of the old dot matrix printers. I had mine spitting out yards of ascii art on continuous feed, fanfold paper.

The sound is identical to my Apple ImageWriter 1, and it looks like a rebadged C.Itoh 8510. These printers are indestructible.

A dot matrix printer printing so satisfying.

I loved the video and i hope all the bunnies recover well. thank you again for another entertaining video.

Oh, the sound of that printer. I haven't even watched the video, but I remember it clearly. (Also the µLine 80 and 82/92 by Oki, they had their own distinct "music".) I still have an Oki µLine 80, and I guess it still works, although it hasn't been used for decades. But the LA50, with its half-line feeds and reverse line feed iirc, etc. A wonderful device.

All the best wishes for your animals.

That looks like a rather small printer; certainly smaller than the OkiData ML320 Turbo I have at work. Probably the FF/LF buttons won’t do anything while the ready light is on; this is so it doesn’t do something stupid while you’re printing out a lengthy report and someone bumps one of those switches… or plays an office prank! 😮

That looks exactly like the ribbon on my Imagewriter II! Also, you never cease to show your love for your animal family. Love to you and yours. (also the thing with the ears at 0:38 is hilarious. :D)

In these printers FF and feed button works only in offline mode. If printer is online these keys are ignored. Same rule is for any dot printer.

11:15 That is why we used to have drawers full of adaptors and cable set-ups...

This equipment brings back memories of my first days as an engineer. Your dedication and enthusiasm are amazing.

My parents had one of these when I was a kid. I was teaching myself assembler using the old DOS Debug command. Then I discovered MASM and I printed out so much code. My parents thought I was breaking the machine since they couldn't understand the code - they called it my gobbledygook once I explained to them what I was doing :D

Looks exactly like my C. Itoh 8510 (?) which is still connected and working with my original Apple II. The C. Itoh only has a parallel port though...thanks for the tips!

I still have an Apple ImageWriter. I love those noisy printers. I want to use The Print Shop to make banners.

Brings back memories of printing documents on the Star LC24-200 back in the 90's. Fancy with a bunch of fonts that could be selected, and the CYMK ribbon that took forever to print anything...

dude that printer looks a lot like an apple image writer the ribbon 100% is and the paper feed too

That bunny went a toggle switch 😂😂😂

The most interesting part about this printer is that it has the DEC proto-ISO-8859-1 character set.

If you want to give this printer its own theme song, "I love L.A." by Randy Newman would be a good starting point.

Thanks for the video. I hope everything else works out for the best.

Great video! I really enjoy you bringing the vintage equipment to life. It reminds me of my earlier days when an Apple ][e or a PET 2001 made my eyes wide with excitement. Then, when I got to EMU, the VAX 11 systems opened me up to a whole new world. Thank you so much!

Thanks for putting out a video on a stressful week and thanks for your kindness to animals. Even "low effort" videos can be enjoyable and this one was fun for me to watch with my morning coffee. I had some experience with the LA50 printers connected to Rainbows. Most of my DEC printer experience was LA120 and LA36 and of course the LP02 line printers. I seem to recall that the LA50 was actually made by NEC for DEC. Thanks David!

The number of ribbons and fuses I changed on mine and the miles of printout I created, but I just threw it away, can't even remember how long ago! 😢

oh I do remember waiting on the old dot matrix printers, that is until the place I was working got a line printer, man that thing was fast, and LOUD, but it printed faster than the old printer could feed through pages.

Awesome 👏

One of our cats had her jaw become dislocated for who knows what this past week, after losing a kitty a few years ago when he was young we were horrified. I feel your pain, I love animals more than most of the humans so yeah. Hope they keep recovering!

i have also a dot matrix printer left, but i am happy that the laser printer is more silent and faster at work. Sometimes i use the matrix printer to print out a source code listing. It's better readable and you have just one long paper instead a bunch of single papers. The handling is easier and the printout is in the right order...

Rest in peace 😢 🐰 ♥️♥️♥️♥️

Sorry to hear about your animals 😔 glad that things are going a bit better :). My first printer was a rainbow 2000 with an IEC connection to my commodore this video definitely brings back memories 😊

I believe that when I was working at University of Newcastle (Australia) back in the 80's we had one of these attached to a Rainbow in one of the public areas.

Awesome video as usual. And prayers & good thoughts for the rabbit friends.