The EP-101 was the first ever electronic miniprinter for printing figures and symbols and was launched by Shinshu Seiki Co., a subsidiary of Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd, in September 1968. The

drum printer A line printer Printer (computing), prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early line printers were printer (computing)#Impact printers, impact printers. Line printers are mostly associated with unit record eq ...

wasn't very big, being only 164 millimetres in width, 102 millimetres in height, 135 millimetres in depth and weighed 2.5 kilograms. It was created out of development work that Shinshu Seiki did for the

Seiko Group is a Japanese corporate group consisting of three core companies Seiko Group Corp. (Seiko), Seiko Instruments Inc. (SII) and Seiko Epson Corp (Epson). The three companies are linked by a common thread of timepiece technology. Epson has establi ...

when they became the official time-keepers for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games and needed a machine that could print out times they gathered from their time-pieces. In 1975, Shinshu Seiki began branding printers as EPSON. The brand name comes from the next generation version of this printer – ''son'' of ''EP'', or EP-son. Shinshu Seiki renamed Epson Corporation in 1982 and was merged with Suwa Seikosha to form

Seiko Epson Corporation Seiko Epson Corporation, or simply known as Epson, is a Japanese multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer printers and information- and imaging-related equipment. Headquartered in Suwa, Nagano, ...

in 1985.

External links

The world's first smallest digital printer – and progenitor of Epson
Computer printers Epson {{commonscat