The Okimate 10 by Oki Electric Industry was a low-cost 1980s color printer with interface "plug 'n print" modules for Commodore, Atari, IBM PC, and Apple Inc. home computers.
Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd., commonly referred to as OKI, OKI Electric or the OKI Group, is a Japanese company manufacturing and selling info-telecom and printer products. Headquartered in Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo, OKI operates in over 120 countries around the world.
Commodore International was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines (CBM), participated in the development of the home–personal computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The company developed and marketed the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64 (1982), and released its Amiga computer line in July 1985. With quarterly sales ending 1983 of $49 million, Commodore was one of the world's largest personal computer manufacturers.
Atari SA is a French corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972, currently by Atari Interactive, a subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, California in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and home computers. The company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
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Unlike thermal printers, which use thermal printing technology and require thermal paper, the Okimate used thermal transfer technology and was advertised as being able to print on any type of paper. In practice, however, printing to common printer/copier paper did not produce adequate results. Best results were obtained by printing to special "thermal transfer paper" which looks like ordinary copier paper but is actually an ultra-smooth paper for the wax-transfer to adhere to.
Thermal printing is a digital printing process which produces a printed image by selectively heating coated thermochromic paper, or thermal paper as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image. Two-colour direct thermal printers can print both black and an additional colour by applying heat at two different temperatures.
Thermal paper, can be referred as Audit roll, is a special fine paper that is coated with a material formulated to change color when exposed to heat. It is used in thermal printers and particularly in inexpensive or lightweight devices such as adding machines, cash registers, and credit card terminals.
A thermal transfer printer contains a ribbon cartridge that uses a wax ink. When the heating elements in the print head heat up, they melt the wax and transfer it to the paper, thus the need for the paper to be really smooth. This also means that the ribbon cannot be reused after the head runs over it, since the wax transfers off the ribbon to the paper.
The Okimate 10 had two interchangeable wax-ink cartridges, a black one and a color one. The black cartridge was used for text printing, and the color was used for graphics. The color ribbon had three primary colors which were overlaid and dithered on top of each other to create secondary colors. Thus to print a graphic, the printer typically needed to make three passes over the same line before advancing.
It was one of the first low-cost color printers available to consumers and became a popular printer for printing computer art drawn with software packages such as KoalaPad, Deluxe Paint, Doodle! and NEOchrome but was criticized for its slowness and high cost of operation, as the wax-coated ribbon only lasted for one pass, unlike an ink ribbon. The Okimate 10 was succeeded by the Okimate 20.
Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many traditional disciplines are now integrating digital technologies and, as a result, the lines between traditional works of art and new media works created using computers has been blurred. For instance, an artist may combine traditional painting with algorithm art and other digital techniques. As a result, defining computer art by its end product can thus be difficult. Computer art is bound to change over time since changes in technology and software directly affect what is possible.
The KoalaPad is a graphics tablet produced from 1983 by U.S. company Koala Technologies for the Apple II, TRS-80 Color Computer, Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64, as well as for the IBM PC.
Deluxe Paint, often referred to as DPaint, is a bitmap graphics editor series created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts. The original Deluxe Paint was written for the Commodore Amiga 1000 and released in November 1985. It was eventually ported to other platforms, including an MS-DOS version which became the standard for pixel graphics in video games in the 1990s, the only competitor being Autodesk Animator Pro.
