Commodore Printers and Plotters
Commodore sold printers for every generation of its computers, though it rarely built them itself. Most were mechanisms from established makers placed in Commodore cases with Commodore's own interface and character set, which is why the same model can turn up wearing a familiar name inside.
The PET and CBM business machines used printers on the parallel IEEE-488 bus. The 2022 and its friction-feed sibling the 2023 were 80-column dot-matrix printers; the 4022 was based on the Epson MX-80, and the 4023 offered a denser character matrix. Wider work called for the 136-column 8023P or the 132-column 8024, built by Mannesmann Tally. The 8026 and 8027 were based on an Olympia electronic typewriter, the 8300P was a daisy-wheel printer based on the Diablo 630, and the 6400 came from C. Itoh.
The VIC-20 and Commodore 64 introduced the cheaper serial bus and a new family: the VIC-1515, the VIC-1525 (with a 1525e variant adjusted for the 64's timing), the 1526, later renamed MPS-802, and the four-colour VIC-1520 plotter. These were followed by the MPS-801 and MPS-803, which could print Commodore's graphics characters. The MPS name, short for Matrix Printer Serial, continued through later models built by companies such as Seikosha, Epson, Citizen and Olivetti, including the MPS-1000, the Citizen-based MPS-1200 and the MPS-1250 with both serial and Centronics connections, and on to ink-jet models such as the MPS-1270. The DPS-1101 was a Juki-based daisy-wheel printer and the MCS-801 a colour dot-matrix model.
Collectors value boxed examples and working early serial printers, but should expect consumables such as ribbons, and on the 1520 the pens, to need replacing.