Oki Microline
More info
- Creator
- Oki Electric (Okidata)
- Released
- 1980
- Type
- Dot matrix printer
A dot matrix line that started in 1980 and is still in production, for the simple reason that a carbon copy requires a physical blow.
Okidata, Oki Electric's American arm, launched the Microline 80 in 1980: nine pins, 80 columns, aimed at home computers and small offices at a time when the printer cost more than the machine driving it. The range grew with the wide-carriage ML82 and ML83, the smoother-printing ML92 and ML93, and by the start of the 1990s the ML320 and ML321 — the generation you can still buy new. Off to one side sat the Okimate 10 (1984), one of the few colour printers aimed at homes, built on thermal transfer rather than impact.
That a nine-pin printer is still sold in the 2020s is physics rather than nostalgia: carbonless multipart forms are copied by the pressure of the pins, and no inkjet on earth produces a duplicate. Shipping desks, pharmacies, workshops and vehicle inspection bays stayed put for that reason. Oki meanwhile bet early on LED arrays instead of lasers in its page printers, a choice that set the company apart from the rest of the industry.