J.B. Wood wrote to Ron Lauzon <=-

Hello, and IIRC there was a C-64 color printer that used 4 ballpoint
pens. Don't know what commercially-available apps might have been available that would use it, though. Sincerely,

Yes, I have the Radio Shack version of it (several printers used the same ALPS mechanism - including my TRS-80 PC-2).

They weren't ball point, but rather stiff markers and it was closer to a printer/plotter than the color printers that we know today. They are really nice for printing some text and doing plotting-style drawing, but aren't very good at making nice, full color printers.

But they would have worked out well with Print Shop. But, again, I don't believe that something like that was commonly used by the C-64 users and, so, Broderbund wouldn't have seen much market for a color Print Shop.


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On 10/12/2020 3:25 PM, Ron Lauzon wrote:

J.B. Wood wrote to Ron Lauzon <=-

JW> Hello, and IIRC there was a C-64 color printer that used 4 ballpoint
JW> pens. Don't know what commercially-available apps might have been
JW> available that would use it, though. Sincerely,

I know the printer. It was made for many computers by ALPS and it didn't use ballpoint pens, but you're close.

It was more of a simple plotter device and worked really good for relatively small prints with lines. So big banners would have used up your pens pretty quick (seeing how small they were).

So it worked, but it wasn't a big seller.

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It was the Commodore 1520. Actually, I think it did use ballpoint pens.

Jim

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Jim Brain, brain@jbrain.com
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