Print thimble (also know as a daisy wheel when the fingers are flat and not bent as in the above picture.)  Each finger had two characters, usually  a capital and lower case letter (i.e.  A & a ) although one could get scientific and mathematical and various language  thimbles as well as various fonts & styles  of print thimbles  (Times Roman,  Serif and San-Serif, compressed  etc:)  The thimble set inside the ribbon and twisted around until the correct character was under the hammer, the thimble would lift if a lower case letter was  required and then the hammer would fire, pushing the required character against the ribbon which then hit the paper leaving its mark. At which point the thimble would spin to the next required character. This happened so fast that the thimble was just a blur in motion and the noise of the hammer operation was quite loud.  There were various types of ribbons  - fabric ribbons  were general purpose ribbon and just went round in an endless  loop with the print quality slowly  fading with every pass.  Multi-strike ribbons  were high quality  ribbons that were used more than once but the quality quickly faded after a few passes.  The single strike ribbon were high quality single use ribbons which gave the best print but only lasted for one cycle of the ribbon.

Nec 7700 daisy wheel printer.  55 characters a second.  45 lbs (20 kgs) weight.  Could be fitted with traction feed and a sheet feeder for continuous operation.  The 7700Q (fitted with the Qume type of parallel interface which was an enhanced version of the standard parallel interface) could actually reverse feed the paper while still printing.  This method was used to print sub-scripts and pie charts etc. The head carriage assemble moved from left to right just like a current ink jet printer except that the mark on the page was caused by the action of a hammer. This made the printer very noisy and due to the weight of the printer and its speed of operation a sturdy table was required to support it.

Hammer under white cover

Wires to pull print head assembly across width of printer

Platten roller

Carriage guide bars on which head assembly rolled

Before the NEC range of printers there was the QUME printers. The Qume 3 was the enhanced parallel version (up to 55 characters a second) while the Qume Sprint 5 was the serial version. Both used ribbons and a daisy wheel.

There were various variations of these printers  /35  /45  /55, reflecting the speed of print in characters per second (cps). There was also “special” printers in both the serial and parallel versions. The TwinTrack which had two print heads fitted and linked together; could reach speeds of up to 75 cps. The WideTrack had a wider platen and up to a 28 inch wide form could be accommodated with an actual print width of 26.4 inch.  The latter printer could be used as a plotter or for printing larger forms or for printing forms side by side. Tractor feed assembly and sheet feeders were available for these printers as was two colour ribbons.  Printers  weight from 28 to 45 lbs.

Others printers used were:

Texas 810 - This was a very heavy duty 9 pin dot matrix printer, only fitted with a traction feed assembly. 130 characters per second print speed. Very reliable and built to print all day, every day.  I know of some of these printers still running after 20 odd years.

Anadex 9600 -  another dot matrix printer, again only traction feed and about 160 cps.

Epson MX100 -Again a dot matrix printer (100cps). A much lighter and cheaper and slower printer which was mainly due to the slower vertical paper movement  when compared to the Anadex or Texas printer (or even the NEC daisy wheel printers)  The latter printers could “throw” or form feed a sheet of paper in less that two seconds while the Epson “inched” the form up; taking 5 seconds to do the same movement so that the overall printing was slower.

Flat print thimble as used on the Qume range of printers

NEC style print thimble. The thimble set inside the ribbon on the right and rotated around.

The serial Qume 5 printer below had a lot more knobs that the paralled verison. This allowed setting the correct  baud rade, stop bit and other serial protocols