This is a full Print Shop banner printed on a Kodak Diconix 150 portable inkjet, driven from a real MS-DOS 6.22 machine — 32 minutes of continuous fan-fold paper feeding through a 1989 printer, start to finish, no cuts.
Two refurbished Kodak Diconix 150 Plus inkjet printers are now working. Both of them. So naturally the first thing I did was print a banner — a real banner, thirty minutes, continuous form feed, The New Print Shop running in DOS 6.22, the full print run from start to finish with audio on and no cuts.
What You’re About to Hear
If you spent any time near a school computer lab between 1987 and 1995, this sound is already somewhere in your head. You haven’t thought about it in decades. The second the inkjet carriage starts moving, you’ll know exactly where you were standing. That specific drawer in your brain is still there, right next to the smell of mimeograph paper and whatever the cafeteria smelled like on pizza day.
The New Print Shop on DOS 6.22. TheRND2 spelled out in full across a continuous form feed banner, with a graphic at each end. Printing starts at 6:04 if you want to skip ahead, but I’d recommend not.
Why Banner Printing Was a Privilege
Nobody printed a banner unless it mattered. You were using real ink — a LOT of it — on paper that cost something, in a session that took the better part of an hour. Continuous form feed is the only format that actually does a banner right. Modern inkjet and laser printers make you tape standard sheets together and call it a banner. That’s not a banner. This is.
The Diconix 150 Plus is a portable inkjet from the late 80s and early 90s — battery-powered, surprisingly capable, and completely forgotten. Getting two of them working was the project. This is the victory lap.
Watch it with the sound on.
Rob streams live repairs and builds every Tuesday and Saturday at 7pm Eastern on Twitch. The Bonus Life N64 build — a complete custom Nintendo 64 rebuilt from scratch and given away July 3rd, 2026 — was the current main series.
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What printer is this?
The Kodak Diconix 150 is a battery-capable portable inkjet from the late 1980s built on the HP 51604A “ThinkJet” cartridge platform. It prints at 192 dpi over a standard parallel (LPT) port and speaks EPSON and IBM Proprinter emulation — which is exactly why 1980s DOS software like The Print Shop can drive it with no custom driver. It was one of the first genuinely portable inkjets you could carry next to a laptop.
How do you print a banner from The Print Shop on DOS?
The Print Shop’s banner mode tiles a design across continuous fan-fold paper and streams it to the printer one column strip at a time. On MS-DOS you point the software at LPT1, load the tractor-fed paper, and let it run. There is no spooler, so the print happens live, in real time, exactly as fast as the head and the paper feed allow — that is the entire 32 minutes you hear here.
Why the ASMR — no music, no narration?
Because the machine is the whole point: the inkjet head sweeping, the stepper advancing the paper one line at a time, and the fan-fold sheets folding back onto the desk. It is the sound of how computers used to make things you could actually hold.
More restorations and mods live on the Builds & Projects page, and I do this kind of work live on Twitch every Tuesday and Saturday.