My father has an old computer and runs DOS (6.0, I think), and his old HP DeskJet seems to be on its last legs. We’re looking for a replacement, but it seems as though most inexpensive inkjet printers these days require some flavor of Windows (or Mac).
I’ve found a Brother laser printer (HL-1440) that is PCL compatible and locally available for only $180 (cheap for a laser). Does anyone know of any reason why this won’t work?
But since that’s a little more than we’d like to pay, does anyone know (no WAGs, please) of an inkjet printer for less than $150 that will work with DOS? Has to be parallel, of course.
Please don’t bother suggesting moving to Windows (or Mac): Dad doesn’t need it, doesn’t want it.
Umm… thanks for trying Q.E.D., but as far as I can tell, none of those printers meets my criteria: currently available new (not interested in used), and under $150. Most of the ones on that list are no longer available, and those that are start at $200.
Anyone else have any ideas?
For instance, does anyone know whether I can get away with buying a modern Windows inkjet printer (with a parallel connector) and just telling DOS that it’s a generic printer? Are the underlying printer protocols still the same from the DOS era, with new stuff laid on top, or will a Windows printer not be able to make head or tails of the signals from DOS?
Windows printing is a whole new animal. Rather than sending out a series of commands to print a line of text letter by letter, the print driver takes the line of text and creates a picture of it, then sends the picture of words to the printer. This is a huge simplification, but hopefully, it gets the idea.
DOS has been essentially, if not officially dead since 1995 or so.
Some WAGs here, since no printer experts have shown up yet. I’ll start with an intro.
IIRC and AFAIK a lot of modern windows printers are cheap because they make the computer do the work: the printer drivers have sophisticated stuff for decoding fonts and steering the printer. In the old days, you only sent printer codes (like ‘change font’, ‘underline’) to the printer, which executed these and kept its state in memory. So indeed many current printers may provide problematic.
Furthermore IIRC in DOS every program had it’s own ‘drivers’: it needed to know the specific printer codes for each printer. So you needed translation tables for each specific printer. If you didn’t have such a table, the program could only work with your printer if the printer was compatible with one that the program did recognize. However, this was only a problem if you wanted fancy word processing stuff. For simple printing of text from the command line or an editor, most printers would be able to do that.
Now: what does your dad want to use the printer for? If it is only for printing text from the command line, it could well be that even modern printers are able to do that. If he wants to do word processing, he can only use a modern printer if he knows that it is compatible with an older one that is recognized, or if he can manually build the translation table.
If you have a cheap printer yourself, you could try whether it works with simple commands by starting up a DOS prompt and printing from there. I think, but do not know for sure, that the DOS prompt >PRT: should output directly to the parallel port.
I should have started saying: what gotpasswords said.
Did some Googling around, too. I’m sorry to say in general it looks bleak for your father. This site for example mentions that only a very few printers might qualify. I checked, and indeed cheap printers as far as I could see only come in USB variants (which will never work with DOS) and are purely Windows-driven. Compatibility might only be found with more extensive laser printers, but those are outside the limits you set.
However, I also checked the printer you mentioned. Brother UK says it should be DOS compatible. This could well be the case, since it’s a laser printer, which often still have their own internal ‘driver’ software and hardware for decoding simpler commands. So that might be the way to go. It doesn’t say whether it is compatible with a specific older DOS-printer, however. If you want to be sure, you should try to hunt for a table with printer codes or a copy of the instruction booklet. If it says that specific codes lead to specific actions, it would be what you need.
You can find an instruction manual here. If you download it, you can see that it doesn’t contain a printer code table. However, at page 105 it does specifically list the resolution in various operating systems, and lists DOS besides Windows and Mac. This looks as if it would print in ‘pure’ DOS.
Furthermore, this faq page specifically goes into the issue of DOS-compatibility of Brother printers. I’ll leave it to you to read for yourself: it says that many Brother printers actually do emulate (hence are fairly or fully compatible with) older Epson and IBM printers. That would make it work with wordprocessors.
Hope this all helps. And of course, no guarantees, I just repeat what I found at Brother’s website.
95% of Dad’s printing is from Word Perfect for DOS 6.0. I’m pretty sure it would recognize a LaserJet printer, which is why I thought a PCL compatible printer might work, although those standards, too, may have advanced too far to work with such old software.
Does anyone know about this?
We may have to look into buying a used printer, or possibly trying to convert to W2000 and set it up so it runs in a DOS window that looks just like his current setup.
But if anyone knows of any other printers or solutions, I’m still interested. Thanks.
On preview I see Tusculan has found some interesting stuff. I’ll check it more thoroughly later this evening (when I’m not at work) and get back.
commasense, I have a Brother HL-1240. It has a great big sticker on it that says it prints under DOS.
My own rule of thumb has been that if a printer has its own quantity of memory (as opposed to using the host system’s, which requires a driver), it will probably print in DOS. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
I really have no clue here, but I do have in my garage 2 old HP printers (560s?) that are DOS compatable.
Take over payments ($0) and you pay the shipping.