PCjr expert Mike Brutman has speculated that IBM didn’t sell a lot of these printers and they ended up in the hands of other resellers who adapted them for other purposes. I can absolutely confirm this printer got repurposed for other computers. I used an IBM PC Compact Printer with my Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s, and I remember the circumstances.
The IBM 5181’s alias: The Protecto Big Blue Printer
We got our first computer, a Commodore 64, in December 1984. Its story is here if you’re interested. The bundled printer had a short warranty and broke soon after, and wasn’t worth repairing. We didn’t know how much we would use a printer, so we opted to replace it as cheaply as we could while we figured out how much we would actually print.
Protecto Enterprizes, a large mail order dealer near Chicago, had just the thing. They called it the Big Blue Printer. It cost $40 when we got it and it sounded like a miracle. It was made by Canon for the IBM PC and PCjr, and they had a adapters to make it work with other computers, including a Commodore. The adapter cost around $20. So for $60, you had a printer.
Considering the printer originally retailed for $199, according to the ad, it seemed like a great deal. Brutman says it retailed for $175, and I’m inclined to believe him. The retail prices in Protecto ads needed to be taken with a grain of salt sometimes.
The printer was rebadged IBM 5181. Protecto put their own rectangular label over the area where the IBM badge went. A sticker on the back revealed the original model number of 5181001, FCC ID AZD9MA5181001, and stated it was made in Japan, though there was no mention of IBM on ours. I have seen some that still had a sticker saying it was manufactured for IBM.
Even with the adapter, this was the cheapest printer on the market in the mid 1980s. We’re talking 1/2 to 1/3 the price of almost anything else you could find, including other no-name closeout specials.
I remember the price varying, and I remember them advertising the thing heavily. Sometimes they raised the price to $50, and sometimes they would lower it to $30, especially as the decade wore on. And yes, the inventory did last several years.
Since it took years to sell through the inventory at a fraction of its original cost, there must have been a catch. More on that after we talk about the Big Blue Printer’s British alias.
The Serial 8056 printer
In the UK, the IBM PC Compact Printer became the Serial 8056 Compact Printer, sold by high-street electronics retailer Dixons for use with Amstrad and Sinclair computers. Dixons sometimes bundled it along with a Sinclair QL. UK computer magazines covered the Serial 8056 fairly heavily, sharing technical details to help Sinclair and Amstrad owners get the most out of the printer. It typically came with an adapter to convert the PCjr serial plug into an appropriate connector for other computers, such as the telephone-style connector the QL used.
The Serial 8056’s sticker concealed its origins, except to say it was made in Japan. The sticker contained the words SERIAL 8056, stated it ran at 240 volts and 50 Hz, and had the usual safety warnings not to open the device and to protect it with a 3 amp fuse.
I’ve also seen Serial 8056 printers with a 5-pin DIN plug on it for use on a ZX Spectrum 128. Whether Dixons, an end user, or someone else made the modification is unclear, but removing the bespoke PCjr serial plug and replacing it with a more common plug wouldn’t be a terribly difficult modification.
It’s entirely possible it saw use with other UK computers as well, because it was inexpensive, readily available, and used the RS-232 standard. It just had a funny looking plug, but that was cheap and easy to change. And just like the USA, a ready supply of cheap printers made inexpensive home computers more useful.
The catch with the IBM 5181/Big Blue Printer/Serial 8056
This printer, no matter what you called it, was affordable and versatile. So there must have been a catch. I can verify, indeed there was a catch, and not just its slow 50 character per second print speed, which was half to 1/3 the speed of typical printers in the 1980s.
Print quality
I don’t have any surviving printouts, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute, but the resolution was around 70 dots per inch. The text was readable, and unlike some printers it competed with, the tails of characters like the lowercase g and lowercase y did extend below the baseline, rather than sitting awkwardly elevated on the baseline. The text looked crude by modern standards and wouldn’t win any awards in 1984 or 85. But by the standards of its day, its print quality was acceptable.
The paper
The other catch was the paper. The IBM PC Compact printer/Big Blue Printer used thermal paper, just like an early fax machine, or a cash register. The paper had ink impregnated in between its layers, and heat would activate it, making it visible. It meant you didn’t need ribbons or toner or any other kind of ink in the printer itself. The ink was part of the paper. The catch was the paper was expensive. It cost twice as much as fanfold paper for the more conventional printers of the day. It could use rolls like a fax machine and could hold a roll inside. But IBM offered perforated sheets as well. Protecto continued that, and they probably made more money on the paper than on the printers. That’s why they liked this printer so much they bought out the factory.
The other catch was the paper was very sensitive. If you exposed it to heat, it could turn completely black. And the ink would break down over time. After a few years, the ink would fade and no longer be readable.
The printer was cheap to buy, but if you used it a lot, the economy wasn’t great.
The verdict?
Mike Brutman is right, it wasn’t a bad printer. It was a reasonable deal for the money, especially if you got one on sale for $30 later in the decade, or bundled for essentially nothing when you purchased a computer. Other cheap printers like the Leading Edge Gorilla Banana and the Commodore 1525 gave worse print quality. They were cheaper to operate, but they looked just as unprofessional.
And it was reliable. When I had one, we used it for several years, and the printer never broke. I sold it in the early ’90s at a computer swap meet. It still worked, it just wasn’t useful for much at that point.
These printers do turn up from time to time, but there isn’t a lot of demand for old printers, and most people who want a vintage printer already have more than they want or need.
Asking prices are all over the place. The last time I saw one sell, it sold for $50. That’s more than they were worth in 1987, at least if you ignore inflation. I’ve seen people ask for $100 or even $150 for one, and that’s way too much.
Compatibility
The printer had a non-standard RS232 connector, but with a simple cable or adapter, it could connect to a serial port on an IBM PC, Apple II, Sinclair QL, Sinclair Spectrum 128, or any other computer with an RS-232 port. Printing plain text wouldn’t have been a problem, as long as your software could print to the serial port. Graphics may have been a problem. Its graphics mode was similar to Epson printers, but I don’t know if it was compatible.
Protecto sourced adapters to make it work with other machines, including Commodore and Atari. The Commodore adapter converted the RS232 to Commodore’s weird IEC serial interface. The Atari adapter presumably converted RS232 to Atari SIO. The Commodore adapter emulated a 1525 printer, including ASCII to PETSCII translation and graphics translation. This allowed it to work with popular software of the time, including every word processor and programs like Print Shop.
Protecto sold the printer separately and bundled with other computers. They would frequently bundle a Commodore 64 or Laser 128 with this printer and whatever monitor they could scrounge up, sometimes along with a third-party floppy drive.
If you wonder why every other IBM PCjr accessory seemed to be more readily available at Computer Reset than the IBM PC Compact Printer, this would be why. Protecto bought most of them. I found some IBM 5181s in a 1992 Computer Reset catalog, priced at $99. So that tells me Computer Reset had a supply of them too at some point. But they didn’t get all of them.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.