A Typewriter and a Printer

For years I had been wanting a typewriter that could also double as a daisywheel printer, but they are very rare! My first attempt was Royal Alpha 2015 daisywheel typewriter, which has the ability to print. Long story short, it had a bunch of issues and died a little while later. I went through this same process again with a Swintec 4000 typewriter, and finally decided on trying to find the ultimate hybrid: The IBM Wheelwriter typewriter with the PC printer option.

For months, I check Ebay, Craigslist, and other online marketplaces. The occaisional Wheelwriter with the printer option would pop up, but always in the full sized variant of the Wheelwriter, which I had no space for. The only "personal" sized one with it installed was non-functioning.

After getting impatient, I began calling Wheelwriter sale and repair shops for one. Almost all had none, except for a singular shop halfway across the country. The had a single PC Printer option for the Personal Wheelwriter 2 and I snapped it up. I paid quite the premium price, because the option was an extra $100 add-on. After 2 long months of waiting, it finally arrived through the mail. The shop even had a copy of the original manual, and I've now documented it here.

As a typewriter, it is perfection. The keyboard is identical to the IBM Model M, which is already my favorite keyboard, so bonus points already.  

It has everything you'd expect out of a "modern" typewriter - correction, bold, underline, centering text, auto carriage return, and right flush, plus some extras, such as spell check, automatic paper loading, temporary left margins, decimal tab, word erasing, superscript/subscript, and moving the carriage whole words at a time, rather than individual characters. 

Note that there is no platen knob - it's almost completely automatic; to load paper you let it rest against the paper rest, and then pull forward the paper bail lever all the way forward, and then the typewriter loads up the paper nice and neat. That's all you need to know about using it as a typewriter.

This is the whole reason I bought this thing haha.

For using your Wheelwriter as a PC Printer, you will need a basic Generic/Text Only printer driver on your computer and a USB to Centronics Parallel cable. The printer port is located on the back of the machine.

Start by switching to printer mode, use Code + 5 and the line spacing indicator lights, 1.5, 2, and 3 will turn on, signaling it's in printer mode and ready to accept data. Next,  connect it to a computer (I am using Windows 11 here) and manually add it as a Generic/Text Only printer using a Text only driver and the USB port.

• To print from command prompt - you can use a simple Echo command and send it to the printer.  For example, use " echo TEXT HERE > LPT1 " This will have the printer print "TEXT HERE", note that margins are ignored when using it, so you have to print out each line individually, or you can maybe  write a program to add carriage returns if wanted, I don't know how though.

• To print from Google Docs/word processing software - Set text to a monospaced typeface such as Courier, and set the font size to match the characters per inch (CPI) on your Printwheel. Then print to the Generic Text Only printer you just set up.

Printing can be funny sometimes. It will often move the paper up a few to many lines, and the lack of word wrapping can be an issue for some. To change printer settings, you press Code + 6, which will still keep on the printer option, but in not ready mode, meaning it won't accept data. Settings can be found in the manual.

The IBM Personal Wheelwriter 2 with the PC Printer Option is an amazing typewriter, and a mediocre printer, but it's still part of the 1980's charm. As a typewriter, it has everything I love - the best keyboard, amazing features, and great print quality, especially compared to my Smith Corona daisywheel PWP 2400 word processor. Not to mention Wheelwriters are known for their reliability. As a printer, it's slow, quirky, and sometimes finicky. As a rare piece of computer and typewriter history, it's awesome!

You can still find parts, repair help, and supplies for these today, which is great.

• Tech Tangents did a fantastic video on a Personal Wheelwriter 1, which has no bidirectional printing, unlike the 2. I highly suggest you go watch his video as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlBdIgl7H-s&t=801s&pp=ygUPaWJtIHdoZWVsd3JpdGVy

• The Personal Wheelwriter 2, unlike the Personal Wheelwriter 1 which came before it, has bidirectional printing, which greatly speeds it up in comparison. It's still quite slow though, at a measly 16CPS.

• Here is the manual, I feel it's good to have this documented and preserved - https://archive.org/details/ibm-wheelwriter-series-ii-operators-guide

• This is a text only printer, no graphics, apart form very basic ASCII Art.

• I can't imagine this being a very good purchase instead of a dot-matrix printer back in the day, unless you were going to buy a typewriter and a printer together.