Editing Daisy wheel printing (section)

== History ==
In 1889 Arthur Irving Jacobs patented a daisy wheel design that was used on the Victor index typewriter.

A. H. Reiber of Teletype Corporation received in 1939 a patent for a daisy wheel printer.

In 1970 a team at Diablo Systems led by engineer Dr Andrew Gabor developed the first commercially successful daisy wheel printer, a device that was faster and more flexible than IBM's [[Selectric]] devices, being capable of 30 cps (characters per second), whereas the Selectric operated at 13.4 cps. Andrew Gabor was issued two patents for the invention. 

Xerox acquired Diablo that same year. Xerox's Office Product Division had already been buying Diablo printers for its [[Redactron]] text editors. After 7 years trying to make Diablo profitable, the OPD focused on developing and selling the [[Diablo 630]] which was mostly bought by companies such as [[Digital Equipment Corporation]].{{Citation needed|date=April 2009}} The Diablo 630 could produce letter quality output as good as that produced by an IBM Selectric or Selectric-based printer, but at lower cost and double the speed. A further advantage was that it supported the entire [[ASCII]] printing character set. Its servo-controlled carriage also permitted the use of [[Typeface#Proportion|proportional spaced]] fonts, where characters occupy a different amount of horizontal space according to their width.

The Diablo 630 was so successful that virtually all later daisy wheel printers, as well as many dot matrix printers and even the original [[Apple Laserwriter]] either copied its command set or could emulate it. Daisy wheel printers from Diablo and [[Qume]] were the dominant high-end output technology for computer and office automation applications by 1980, though high speed non-impact techniques were already entering the market (e.g. IBM 6640 inkjet, [[Xerox 2700]] and IBM 6670 laser). From 1981 onwards the [[IBM PC]]'s introduction of "[[Code page 437]]" with 254 printable glyphs (including 40 shapes specifically for drawing forms), and development of [[Xerox Star]]-influenced environments such as the [[Macintosh]], [[Graphics Environment Manager|GEM]] and [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]] made bit-mapped approaches more desirable, driving cost reductions for laser printing and higher resolution for impact dot matrix printing.

Xerox later adapted Diablo's daisy wheel technology into a typewriter that sold for less than $50.{{citation needed|date=October 2018}} An automated factory was built near [[Dallas]] that took less than 30 minutes to assemble a Xerox typewriter. The Xerox typewriter was well received but never achieved the projected sales numbers due to the advent of the PC and word processing software. The typewriter was later modified to be compatible with PCs but the engineering which made it a low cost device reduced its flexibility.<ref>{{ cite book | last = Strassman | first = Paul A. | title = The Computers Nobody Wanted; My Years with Xerox | publisher = Strassmann, Inc. | date = June 5, 2008 | pages = 96–97 | isbn = 978-1-4276-3270-8 }}</ref> By the mid-1980s daisy wheel technology was rapidly becoming obsolete due to the growing spread of affordable laser and inkjet machines, and daisy wheel machines soon disappeared except for the small remaining typewriter market.