Brother EP44 links

Literally just a bunch of links to other things.  All were active as of December 2023.

Picture on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brother_EP-44_Schreibmaschine_Drucker_(1984)_(24493897618).jpg

Used as a teletype: https://www.hackster.io/news/nino-ivanov-brings-dec-s-pdp-8-minicomputer-out-of-the-60s-and-onto-an-arduino-near-you-c7745e17e7fa

On the typewriter database: https://typewriterdatabase.com/Brother.EP-44.10.bmys

The printer component was sold as separate product: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13613/Brother-HR-5-Thermal-Transfer-Printer/

A blog post: http://journeyman.online/printing-device-of-the-new-technology-age-part-2/

Ted Munk’s post: https://munk.org/typecast/2015/11/03/baby-wedge-redux-brother-ep-44/

Customising TasWord and printing from a Timex/Sinclair micro to the EP44: https://www.timexsinclair.com/article/tasword-ii-tasman-serial-interface-brother-ep-44-printer/

A complimentary review: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/11678623/brother-ep44-the-messui-place

Another review: https://worldofspectrum.org/files/large/7d6195c15960b99

An award it won — iF award?: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-classics-past-present-future-brother-ifs-ian-metcalfe/

The manual is available in various places online: http://munk.org/projects/Brother-EP44-User_manual.pdf; https://etzoneorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/ep-44-instruction-guide.pdf; https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1203202/Brother-Ep44.html?page=38#manual

An advert of the time: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1323550993/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1607815555&partId=nla.obj-1323571538#page/n35/mode/1up

Another advert: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1505016111/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1707605796&partId=nla.obj-1505210838#page/n42/mode/1up

Rewind Museum: https://www.rewindmuseum.com/vintagecomputers.htm

Arduino thingy: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/serial-terminal-running-tinybasic/651191

Reddit 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/llluf9/im_in_click_clack_bbs_week_vi_entry_at_110_baud/

YouTube 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_qXlmr6QsU

YouTube 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnefSz8zzYk

The Brother EP44 dot matrix typewriter/serial printer.

The serial port (DB25 female) of the EP44. Case is loose.

The box the Brother EP44 came in.

Character set from the EP44 — ‘a’ is used to demonstrate the range of accents available

DOS prompt on the EP-44 screen

The EP-44 connected to the Armada by a home-made cable

The logo on the EP44

Using the CUPS interface at http://localhost:631 to set the options on the Brother EP-44 printer

Scanner with document feeder to OCR

I want to scan a bunch of typewritten pages. I have an HP OfficeJet Pro 8600, which has a sheet feeeder on the scanner (that is why I got it). It works well with xsane. So … run xsane.

• Choose ADF instead of Flatbed (ADF = automatic document feeder).
• Choose PNM (Tesseract reads these).
• Choose 300 DPI.
• Set the correct number of pages (this is important — leave this as ‘1’ and it will scan all pages but you’ll only get a file for the first one).
• Where the boot is, set the increment in file names (usually this will be 1, but if you are scanning fronts then backs, you can set this to 2, then start at 1 for the fronts and 2 for the backs, and interleave them).
• Select Gray (grey), Full colour range.
• Hit ‘Scan’.

This will/should result in a whole series of PNM files with graduated names. Something like:

north0001.pnm
north0002.pnm
north0003.pnm

Here’s a bit of one.

Then we can try to scan one of them:

tesseract --dpi 300 north0001.pnm n1
vim n1.txt

OK, works, so automate:

for f in *.pnm ; do tesseract --dpi 300 $f $f ; echo $f done! ; done

Detected 155 diacritics
north0001.pnm done!
north0002.pnm done!
Error in boxClipToRectangle: box outside rectangle
Error in pixScanForForeground: invalid box
north0003.pnm done!

Lots of diacritics usually means dirty paper. boxClip stuff, I don’t know, but does not seem to affect the results.

Assuming your files are in the right order, you can just cat them all together and happily edit.

cat north*.txt > North.txt
vim North.txt

Then edit as normal.

This works really well if you have a decent ribbon and clean paper. For example, the snippet above came out as:

Just because you have to try, thought Jake, doesn’t mean you have to Care.

So you can see that despite some grottiness on the paper and a general greyness to the scan, and the fact that this is a typical typewriter font, not a font designed for OCR, the only error is that Tesseract has put a capital ‘C’ on ‘care’. That’s pretty good!

I have tried a few OCR tools, and these days I go straight to Tesseract.

 

OCR

Canon Typestar 90

Meh. Good condition, works well. Nice keyboard. Can use fax rolls –handy when the ribbons are not available. Seems quite well made, too. Here is the users’ manual: http://djg.altervista.org/downloads/typewriter-manuals/Canon-Typestar-90-7II-User-Guide.pdf.

One of the earlier Typestars, so does not have a huge array of symbols nor a large memory to store many files and pages. On the other hand, heavier than later Typestars, it feels more solidly constructed and seems to be made of nicer plastics, if that is not an oxymoron.

Can use various fonts, but I think they are stored in cartridges, of which I have none. Courier is built in.

Hardly a collectors’ item, of course, but one of the nicer examples of its kind.

Kannonen

Typestar 5

What can I say? A pretty standard thermal wedge. You can use it with fax rolls and it runs off D cells, so is portable. Key feel is pretty solid.

NNNNNNN

Hermes 9 in plastic

Hermes 9, very plasticky on the outside, but quite a nice machine to use. Serial number is 8401371 (1972). It has the Hermes key tops, with their pronounced dishing, and a pretty standard font. No exclamation mark.

Best feature — you can see the very clean and even strike, with the highest ascenders and lowest descenders all nice and sharp.

Worst feature may be the styling and the plastic outers. Very uninspiring; but that’s not such a big deal when you are typing busily.

In summary, a very nice standard machine, which would have been an excellent choice for the office of yore. These days it would be perfect if you want to bash out a novel or something.

Inside the case we have a 72 in a circle and the arrow points to 9 — Sept 72?

 

Hermes

Canon Typestar 220-II — a fix

This is a Canon Typestar 220-II (or Typest🟊r, according to the logo). It is a thermal transfer typewriter from the 1990s. Such a machine can print in 2 ways. If you have: thermal paper in it. — like a fax roll — the heating elements in the print head work directly on the paper and turn it dark where it is heated and so print the letters. This printing method is extremely common, because most receipt printers — for example, at the supermarket – – use this form of printing. One of its most important characteristics is that the print will fade over time. That’s why when you find an old receipt left on the dashboard of your car or wherever, it can be faded into uselessness. The other way these machines print is by using thermal transfer ribbons. These used to be common in what were advertised as ‘plain-paper fax machines’. Many fax machines used thermal printing on treated paper, as noted above, but fax paper is thin and the prints do not keep well. By using the thermal print head to melt a black plasticky ink and transfer it to the paper, you can use a thermal print head to print on non-treated paper and also get printouts that last longer. The big problem with this method is that you need the thermal transfer ribbons, and for most of your old typewriters that use the method, they are very difficult to obtain, and often cost a lot more than the machine — this typewriter cost me $12, and I only paid that much because I was feeling supportive of the small business trying to sell it. The cassettes that go in it to allow printing on non-thermal paper can often cost $20 or more each, if available at all, and while the ones in the 220-II are larger and last longer than in some of the other Typestars, they still don’t last that many thousands of words.

Because these days most text ends up in a computer, the transience of thermal printing on treated paper is not such a big deal — I’m going to scan and OCR this text anyway, so after that I don’t care if it fades away.

A quick review of the 220-II; it is a neat unit. It is quite capable — large character set available through not only keyboard but also a scroll-through menu that gives you Greek, mathematical and various other specialist symbols like hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades, the Typestar star (🟊), and so on. The keyboard is like a membrane computer keyboard, and is perfectly adequate. The spell checker works very nicely. We have a small LCD screen, and you can set the machine to only type a line when you complete a line. That means you can fix the spelling before it types out. If the checker is turned on, it will beep when you complete a word that is not in the dictionary. This then prompts a review and you can fix it before it prints. You can, ask the dictionary for suggestions, but usually it is quicker to just fix it. There are many other features, like larger fonts, bold, underline, shaded backgrounds, and other stuff I would probably never use.

Now, when I got this, I bought it in an online auction and when I got it home it did not work. The first and most obvious problem was the rust on the battery terminals. That was easy enough to fix — undo the screws in the bottom and at the back, lift off the top (being careful to keep the ribbon cable to the keyboard in place, seeing as the keyboard comes away with the top) and use a file or some emery paper to clean off the rust. That allowed the things to start when I put the 4 D cells in it, but the printing head would not move. It tried, but failed. The usual reason for this is that the cylindrical rail that it runs on is grubby and/or rusty. And so it was. To remove this I had to lift the printing tray out of the chassis and remove the gears on the left-hand end, then remove a small screw, arrowed in the photo, that holds the rail in place. I could then slide the rail. out and clean it thoroughly. I wanted to also clean the holes in the print head carrier that the rail runs in — no point cleaning the rail if there’s dirt in these guides. To do this, I had to remove the thinner rod that is part of the drive mechanism (it also slides out if you remove a gear or two) then I was able to stand the print carriage on its end (picture) and give the underside a proper clean. Reassembly and testing showed that these things did indeed fix the unit, and now it works as if it were new.

Take me out!

 

Remove the cog, then remove the screw; then you can slide out the rail; it is part way out here. You can see the rusty brown gunk on it, about an inch from the end. Remove the rod all the way out and clean this off!

The underside of the print carriage; the yellow arrow points to the grotty holes that the cylindrical rail needs to slide through; give this a clean!

The 220-II does give an impression of being more built down to a price than some of the earlier Typestars. The case is a thin shell of plastic, the platen knobs just feel thin and cheap, like the plastics themselves are thinner and not as good quality as they might be. Being a fairly late machine (1994 on one of the circuit boards), it has more capable electronics than some of the earlier machines, which is nice, and if they have cut corners, they have not done it in a way that shows in the typing experience — that is, the keyboard is fine, and in fact very usable.  I have found that the two things I had to do to get this to work — clean up the battery terminals and clean the rail for the print head — are very common issues on all kinds of electronic typewriters, whether thermal wedges or larger, ribbon-based desktop machines like your daisy wheel designs. (Well, the desktop ones won’t have battery terminals…) and if the print head tries to move but can’t, look at the rail, and if nothing happens at all in a battery-powered one, look at the battery holder terminals. Now I must go and do something that actually needs to be done, instead of messing around with ancient technology.

It’s alive!

Royal Beta 202 — mixed results

This is a Royal (Triumph Adler) Beta 202 from about 1984. Serial number is B230892871. It is an electronic typewriter, but a pure typewriter — no word processing. No editable memory, as far as I can tell, although if you type a whole lot of characters while the carriage is returning, it will remember them all until they are printed.

It is slightly unusual in that it uses a little roller to ink the letters — apparently it is called a Royal IR 100 (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20150202204358AA3AFfz), but you can’t by them any more –you might be able to get the same roller mounted on a different mounting, I guess. I had some blue stamp-pad ink, so I reinked the roller with that. Results are … adequate. Black would be better.

Someone has managed to use a keyboard from this sort of machine with a Teensy 2.0 as an intermediary to connect it to a computer:

• https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6767
• https://imgur.com/a/qv1jsQ8
• https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/a2h3qt/advice_on_teensy_firmware_for_salvaged_typewriter/

Were it me, I’d go the other way try to send fake keyboard codes to the rest of the machine and so turn the typewriter into a daisy wheel printer. Actually, that sounds pretty good… but I doubt I’ll ever get that far…

Anyway, you can see that this thing is very wedgy. It has a good set of glyphs and seems to be of solid construction. I could not figure out how to set the left margin, despite fiddling with the MR/MS key.

Now, the main point: I find with this machine that I just cannot avoid hitting keys I don’t want unless I focus exclusively on the job of typing, I mean that literally; the job of hitting keys cleanly, and not even thinking about content.

Sure the errors are down to me — they are real — but the machine has a hair-trigger sensitivity that makes me paranoid. On a manual or an electric, and on many electronics, you can brush a key on the way to another without it printing. Not on this. Clip a key, depress it a millimetre, maybe less, and it types. So as a typist you have to be very precise. Only touch the intended key.

That actually makes it hard for me to think about what I am typing, because I have to be so focused on how. On the other hand, typing is not very physically demanding so if you don’t mind a bunch of errors, it is fast and easy.

Other points: The platen is of very small diameter, which does not help with the letters forming; the unit is big enough to have a bigger roller, and I really think that would help.

To pick up and move it feels very heavy and solid for a wedge. Lots of metal inside.

The daisy wheel is labelled: Royal pica 10/12 013050.

Here is a type sample — made using the reinked roller, and of course the roller [ may not be | is not ] in top condition. So not too bad, all told. The ‘a’ and ‘A’ have a diacritic above them — one of those keys that types but does not move. So does the ‘e’ in the first row, which demonstrates the row of extra symbols, the blue keys at the top of the keyboard.

So the symbol collection is quite good for diacritics. We have eszett and cedilla as well as umlaut, acute and … umm … the other one.

The thing would be good for whacking out a first draft of something if you did not mind making a few errors. The keyboard is fast, the touch is light, so it would not be as tiring as a conventional manual. Still, I find it an odd mix of good an not so good. Also, there is nowhere to stow the power cord.

Some more pictures:

The roller — indicated by a yellow arrow

 

I reinked using Artline stamp pad ink

 

We’ll never be royals

 

Smith Corona XL 1500

Well, SC was not long for this world – at least, as a typewriter company — when these came out. Hard to make much money in a shrinking market with commodified hardware.

This is a competent unit from the electronic daisy wheel era.

Daisy wheel is labelled “Regency 10”

 

Just a few words. The machine feels cheap but the results are nice. It has a few extra characters, but not many — accents, but no Greek for example. Seems like a pretty basic model.

One latch is missing, sadly

 

Model 5AEC, apparently

 

 

I have a manual for it; let me know if you’d like a scan (32 pages)

And that’s that.

EP44 and an FTDI USB to serial convertor to print from Windows 10

Finally  got a CHIPI-X10 instead of some cheap knock-off of something else. Works on the Sipix printer. Now, can I get it to print to the Brother EP44 — which, when  I tried the cheap knock-off, actually started behaving funny.

Note: Once I figured out how to print to the EP44 using the FTDI, I tried the same config using a cheapo cable (CH340 chip), and was able to get that to work. Minimising the receive/transmit buffer size seemed to work again. The cheapo cable had baud settings as low as 75, which is in its favour. So the message seems to be that the cheap cable can work, at least on Windows, but you have to get the settings right and you have to go beyond the documentarian when working on obscure old hardware. Experimenting is tricky — I worry about ruining equipment. And the cheap cable does seem flakier — printer does some funny behaviour…

First, I’ll try using the hardware serial port on another machine, to check the printer and the printing method, then I can try the dongle.

OK, hardware port on Linux and it prints.

Now, plug CHIPI into Windows 10 machine, then null modem cable into CHIPI then DE9 to DB25 adapter into null modem then that into the EP44.

Set EP44 to 300 baud, 7 bit, even parity.

Try to add it using Windows Printer dialog.

Using Device Manager, our FTDI unit has provided us with COM2.

We can set baud (say 300 — the smallest the FTDI will cope with), data length and so on to match the printer, and set Xon/Xoff to on, as the EP44 documentation suggests; but the data outstrips the printer and it does not print the whole document. It’s like the Xon/Xoff stuff is not working. Cannot go down to 75 or 110 baud — the printer supports these, but they are too old and slow for a modern serial port to support.

Eventually fixed that too. Here is my batch file to set the port to handshake properly — can then print from the CMD.EXE command line (probably PowerShell, but I would not know) by typing or copying the file to the port:

REM This seems to set the FTDI COM2 port to 
REM print with effective handshaking. 
REM May need to make sure files have EOL that meshes 
REM with what the printer expects. 
REM unix2dos or dos2unix can help here. 
REM If printer is expecting CR+LF, need DOS line endings. 
REM Once the port is set up, and the printer to match, simply: 

REM type filename.txt > com2: 

mode com2: baud=300 parity=e data=7 stop=1 to=on xon=on odsr=off octs=off dtr=hs rts=hs idsr=off

I found that the transit got ahead of the printer and documents would be incomplete. if I wanted to print the whole Windows printer test page, I could only do that if I used these settings, then went to Device Manager to reduce USB transfer sizes to the minimum (64 bytes). So here is the Windows printer test page. Seems funny how many drivers it needs:

And I can also print (text) from Windows applications, like Notepad, suggesting that the EP44 is perfectly usable with Windows 10 in 2021! Not bad for a serial thermal portable typewriter/printer from 1984 or 1985!

The saga does not always continue

Smith Corona Super Speed: the best?

I say without hesitation that this might possibly be the best machine I have. I say that without allowing for age or wear and tear. The typeface is big and clear, the motion is easy, definite and fast. The feel is great. The keys have that classic glass-top look. If there is anything to be critical about, it is that there are some annoying economies that slow you down a bit — ‘el’ for 1, capital ‘oh’ for zero, because it only has digits 2 to 9. That is the main one.

The casing hides a fairly vintage, rather upright mechanism.

When I got it it was missing a spool, but lucky for me my dad is a former toolmaker and has fabricated a replacement. Better than a bought one! You can’t just use regular spools because the old LC Smith typewrites uses a spring-loaded finger inside a drum in the centre of each spool as part of the mechanism.

Relatively few keys — no one or zero.

This is the machine on which you can compose your great [insert country here] novel, and feel like a Hemingway or a Faulkner while you do it. It looks the part, yes, but is it also supremely functional and smooth.

Of course, with old machines, you might get one that has been treated well, or not, so your mileage may vary. I might just have got lucky with this one (though it needs a clean). If I want to do a lot of work on a manual, I use this one. But it is a standard, not a portable, so if you were only going to get one machine, this is not it.

If I had to choose only one portable, I really don’t know. Good Companion 3? Facit? Olympia SM8? Smith Corona Clipper? If I wanted something really portable, yet not too rare, the Empire Aristocrat is pretty nice but, dare I say it, a cheap little Brother JP-1 (eg the 210C) would do a handsome job too.

Of course, I have not sample all that many machines.

Serial number: 1A1606475C 11, seems to date from 1940. Made in Canada, as you can see.

Anyway, the Super Speed is streets ahead of the Remingtons I have seen and used of similar size and age — but then. as noted, how the machine was treated comes into it, so it is hard to know what if anything to say.

 

Good stuff.