If you read enough of the old Timex/Sinclair newsletters, you’ll notice that two printers were especially popular with 2068 owners: the Gorilla Banana/Seikosha GP-100 and the Olivetti PR-2300 “inkjet”.
And you may wonder why those two printers were especially popular.
A Printer Named Banana
The first is easy: Seiko (a relative of Epson) produced the Seikosha GP-100, a printer that was also available as the Tandy DMP-100, Commodore VIC-1525, Axiom GP-100, Gorilla Banana and many others. The printer was ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, the Seikosha had a 7-pin print head and letters with “descenders” (p, y, j, q) were shifted up and the overall print quality was less than other dot-matrix printers.
The Gorilla Banana was the Leading Edge‘s version of the printer, which they advertised heavily in many consumer computer magazines. They claimed compatibility with nearly every home computer, including the Timex.
Enter DAK
In 1984, Leading Edge changed directions and sold the computer accessory line to another company. In this sell-off, DAK Industries picked up Leading Edge’s stock of Gorilla Banana printers. 21,000 printers, to be precise.
DAK Industries was a mail-order liquidator of consumer electronics, some high-end, some not so much. They sold through a full-color catalog and advertised in many consumer publications. At $129, the Gorilla Banana was a very reasonably priced printer in 1984.
Olivetti’s Inkjet
The PR-2300 inkjet was not quite what we call an inkjet printer now. It featured dry “ink” in glass ampules that could apparently print 150,000 characters. Like Leading Edge, Olivetti got out of the consumer printer business in 1984 … and sold their stock to DAK.
The Olivetti was far more capable than the Gorilla and could print at a variety of heights and widths, features that appealed to many computer owners.
DAK claimed to have 12,000 of these printers and sold them at blow-out prices ($199), a price that many owners of inexpensive home computers could not pass up.
