Oh wow. I a Sharp PC-5000 to write software (that would be sold with a PC-5000 as part of the package) that interpreted data from primitive vascular ultrasound and angiodynography machines. It had a built in printer that wasn't the fastest, used a bizarre "bake on" thermal ribbon, but was higher quality and larger than the built in printers in the lab equipment. Was completely obsolete one year later.
That's also very cool, despite being superseded. Amazing the things a primitive machine could do.
Yeah - the Sharp's (optional) built-in thermal printer was much higher resolution (with a 24-dot print head, resulting in around 200dpi IIRC) than most dot-matrix impact printers of that era (8- or 9-pin print heads, 70dpi or so), but the thermal ribbons it used to print on plain paper were hard to come by. You could also use it with thermal paper, but the resulting printouts tended to fade quite quickly (somewhat depending on the environment).
We were thrilled when we managed to get hold of 24-pin impact printers that produced more permanent output, and where we could re-ink the ribbons. Produced camera-ready copy to publish books with those for several years, designing "oversized" fonts that were printed using multiple passes, and then photo-reducing the printed output to boost the effective resolution.
> but the thermal ribbons it used to print on plain paper were hard to come by.
We bought them by the 1000. Each ribbon could only print 5 images, so our customers burnt through them. I bet we made more money on selling ribbons than software :-) Was my fist software development job... so I have a warm spot for that machine.
