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I loved that printer. Did so much with it and was the first time I really did a bunch of stuff with ESC sequences. Bidirectional printing was cool and getting it to print graphics by driving the print head directly felt like magic. Anyone who programmed that printer will be instantly at home with Epson (and compatible) thermal printers and more.

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Indeed! I remember using one to print zooms of the Mandelbrot set in grayscale (highly dithered) from an Apple ][+. For speed I coded in 6502 and called directly into the BASIC floating point routines for the math. The printer would take a day or so to print a sheet worth of image. But it was a great graphic output device, far less ephemeral than the screen. It was somewhat satisfying for it to print a new row of dots every now and then, once the computer had completed some math...

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