Hi, John.
I noticed you saying to All:
JO> In the late 1980's we sold a few of the Mannesmann Tally 24-pin
JO> printers. They were expensive, heavy-duty, high-volume mutiple-pin
JO> printers which had excellent docs and were very reliable.
Don't I recall the name Mannesman Tally associated with POS systems &
such, also?
Me, I've been in some organizations something of an evangelist for the
preservation of the old heavy duty dot matrix printers. For example, at
my old job for a Labor Union, I had the usual little laser printer for
most coorrespondence. I also added an extra parallel port, and plugged
in a used, wide-carriage dot matrix printer. That's where the
single-wide mailing labels resided by default.
So I could (for example) write a batch file to generate all the
correspondence -and- all the mailing labels for a particular project in
the middle of the night. Or if I was doing correspondence manually, I
could go to my database, export the appropriate address to head the
letter, print the label with a couple keystrokes, jump to WP5.1DOS and
generate and print the letter, all without swapping paper & labels &
what-all.
The secret in buying a dot matrix printer, especially for label
printing, is an extremely straight paper path. I got one that fed
straight up from the bottom. Very few jams.
Actually had one putz try to convince me it'd be cheaper to do the
labels with the laser printer. What, and waste most of a page of
labels?
Also, if I had to produce large-volumes of labels, those I'd also send
to the dot matrix. That's one reason why I had the wide-carriage; if I
was doing oodles of labels, single-wides were more likely to jam.
A lot of the mailing houses (you get originals printed & ship them to
the house, and they get them mailed for you) use what are called
Cheshire Labels. They're basically formatted as four or five-wide
labels printed on plain paper, the wide-carriage "computer paper." Just
buy the "greenbar" paper cheap by the case, and use the back side.
And this last year, they had elections. Had to send individual notices
to all 2500 members. Could have spent $1500 paying somebody else to
handle it. Instead, I ran tractor-feed postcards through the dot-matrix
(message on one side, second run for the addresses on the other). Other
than sticking 2500 stamps, the process was quite straightforward, fairly
quick (all the paperwork done in one day), and maybe a third the cost,
postage and all.
The one thing I really enjoyed about that job, was finding ways to do
things cheaply in-house that nobody else had even thought of.
The main thing I -didn't- enjoy was their perception that my paycheck
was the -last- bill to be paid, if they had any money left...
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