Changing The Wheel On A Daisy Wheel Printer
| Field | Printers |
| Went Obsolete | 1980s |
| Made Obsolete By | laser/ink-jet printers |
| Knowledge Assumed | The workings of one of these printers |
| When useful | Still used in the small but still struggling electric typewriter market. |
In the old days, if you wanted a letter quality printout from a computer, the computer used something similar to a type writer to print things out. The most popular system was called a daisy wheel printer, where the print head was a wheel with about 72 spokes each with a different raised letter at the tip. When the printer was used, the wheel was spun until the correct letter was at the highest position and a pin would strike that spoke forcing the raised letter to come in contact with an inked ribbon forcing the ink onto the paper behind the ribbon. This did produce nice, letter quality printing with the sound of a machine gun. If you needed to change fonts, you needed to change the wheel. Sometimes changes were needed during the printing of a single document.