using regular printers with the HP41 & HP82165A

[Garth]

As I mentioned elsewhere, my Thinkjet printer quit working many years ago.  It goes through the motions, but does not put any ink on the paper.  The contacts to the ink cartridge are perfectly clean and shiny like the day they were new.  They've never had any ink or corrosion on them.

Well, a couple of years ago the Epson dot-matrix impact printer I was using with my DOS machine and with my home-made workbench computer went down and I found out it was more expensive to get it repaired than to buy a new one; so I got an Epson LX-350, the least-expensive of the 14 models of dot-matrix impact printers Epson still offers.  It's great that Epson has picked up the slack where other companies have discontinued this kind of printers.  The printer has inputs for RS-232, parallel, and USB, so I can use it from any of my computers, including my HP-41cx through the HP82165A HPIL-to-parallel interface converter.  Without using special instructions with the 82165A, the first line you print will have garbage in it since the buffer will not have been cleared of the random stuff in it, but after that first line, it all goes as normal.  When I got the '165 through eBay, I didn't know if this would work, so I just tried it, and got a nice surprise.  This LX-350 is also much faster than earlier Epsons I've had (although that won't be significant with the slow 41).

The way I was using Epson printers before I got the 82165A interface converter was with the FSI164A HPIL-to-RS232 interface converter (which is almost identical to the 82164A but optionally offers two RS-232 channels stock and optionally up to 8, and offered battery powering), and used that to interface to my home-made workbench computer which I had forward the print data to the parallel interface to the printer, optionally translating control codes (like for bold, italics, etc.) from the Thinkjet's to Epson's ESC/P set.