The Great Little Printer

By Kenneth Bernholm

"The Great Little Printer" is not merely subjective praise for a particular computer printer. It's the actual name of a dot matrix printer from the 1980s manufactured jointly by Centronics and Brother and licensed by several other companies. It exists in two versions described here.

Version 1

The first version has a single bank of configuration switches and no options for Near Letter Quality (NLQ) printing (except the Schneider NLQ401).

Version 2

The second version has two banks of configuration switches and a fourth control panel LED to indicate NLQ mode.

At least one American company licensed The Great Little Printer. It might have been RCA. I've had a scan of the ad but seem to have lost it.

The Brother HR-5 printer is a thermal printer that looks a lot like the Brother M-1009 but shares no mechanical parts.

Version 2 configuration

The settings are problably what most people are looking for, so I have manually translated those here.

Bank 1

Switch Description ON OFF Default
1-1 Interface mode and parity See table 1 ON
1-2
1-3 X-ON/X-OFF (1) Transmit Not transmit ON
1-4 Baud rate See table 2 OFF
1-5 OFF
1-6 ON
1-7 Character code level 8 bit 7 bit ON
1-8 Not used ON
1-9 1″ skip perforation Yes No OFF
1-10 Print mode default NLQ Draft OFF
  1. The mode selected by SW1-3 for the X-ON/OFF line does not affect any of the signal lines except X-ON/X-OFF. The X-ON signal goes off at power-up when the printer is ready to receive data.

Table 1 : interface mode and parity

Switch Parallel Serial (no parity) Serial (odd parity) Serial (even parity)
1-1 ON OFF ON OFF
1-2 ON ON OFF OFF

Table 2 : baud rate

Switch 110 150 300 600 1200 (default) 2400 4800 9600
1-4 OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON
1-5 OFF OFF ON ON OFF OFF ON ON
1-6 OFF OFF OFF OFF ON ON ON ON

Bank 2 in mode 1 (Epson FX) (default)

Switch Description ON OFF Default
2-1 Form length 11″ 12″ ON
2-2 Printer mode 1: Epson FX 2: IBM ON
2-3 National character See table 3 OFF (1)
2-4 OFF
2-5 OFF
2-6 Slashed/unslashed zero with slash without slash ON
2-7 (2) Data buffer Parallel With data buffer Without data buffer ON
Serial X-ON: 153 bytes X-OFF: 1936 bytes
2-8 Not used ON
2-9 (3) CR (AUTO FEED XT) Print with LF Print without LF OFF
2-10 (4) SLCT IN Fixed Not fixed ON

Table 3 : national character

Switch USA England I Germany France England II Sweden Italy Spain
2-3 OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON
2-4 OFF OFF ON ON OFF OFF ON ON
2-5 OFF OFF OFF OFF ON ON ON ON

Bank 2 in mode 2 (IBM)

Switch Description ON OFF Default
2-1 Form length 11″ 12″ ON
2-2 Printer mode 1: Epson FX 2: IBM ON
2-3 Character set Character set 1 Character set 2
2-4 CAN Active Inactive
2-5 LF amount 1/8″ 1/6″
2-6 Data buffer full print with LF without LF
2-7 (2) Data buffer Parallel With data buffer Without data buffer ON
Serial X-ON: 153 bytes X-OFF: 1936 bytes
2-8 Not used ON
2-9 (3) CR (AUTO FEED XT) Print with LF Print without LF OFF
2-10 (4) SLCT IN Fixed Not fixed ON
  1. For printers in all countries except the U.S., SW2-3 is ON.
  2. When using the serial interface, SW2-7 controls the transmission of the X-ON signal. If SW2-7 is ON, X-ON is transmitted when the data buffer is 153 bytes or less due to the data transfer to the print buffer; if it is OFF, X-ON is transmitted if the data buffer is 1936 bytes or less.
  3. When using the parallel port, AUTO FEED XT high or low functionally corresponds to setting SW2-9 to ON or OPEN respectively. However, if SW2-9 is ON and AUTO FEED XT is high, or SW2-9 is OFF and AUTO FEED XT is low, the printer will print with line feed upon receipt of the CR code.
  4. When SW2-10 is ON, the printer can receive data provided it is online. If it is in the offline state, it goes into the BUSY state. If SW2-10 is OFF and SCLT IN is low, the printer can receive data provided it is online; if it is offline, it initially goes to BUSY.

Configuration for parallel port Epson FX emulation

Bank 2 Bank 1
Switch 2-10 2-9 2-8 2-7 2-6 2-5 2-4 2-3 2-2 2-1 Switch 1-10 1-9 1-8 1-7 1-6 1-5 1-4 1-3 1-2 1-1
Position ↓ON ↑OFF ↓ON ↓ON ↓ON ↑OFF ↑OFF ↑OFF ↓ON ↓ON Position ↑OFF ↑OFF ↓ON ↓ON ↓ON ↑OFF ↑OFF ↓ON ↓ON ↓ON

Extras

YouTube has a very detailed video on servicing the Brother M-1109.

Jan Derogee has an informative page about the very similar looking Brother HR-5C thermal printer.