ZX Printer

The ZX Printer used special 4-inch (100 mm) wide black paper which was supplied coated with a thin layer of aluminium.

The expansion bus was duplicated on the outside of the printer's connector, allowing other peripherals to be connected concurrently.

The peripheral was affectionately referred to during the 1980s by users in the UK home computing community (many of whom were teenagers) as 'The Astronaut's Bog Roll' [2] ('bog roll' being common English vernacular for toilet paper, and the astronaut reference pertaining to the silvery, glittery appearance of the ZX Printer's paper).

The printer itself also bore more than a passing resemblance to a 1980s-era toilet-roll dispenser, in terms of its visual design.

[3] Unlike the ZX Printer, it had a separate power supply, and made use of standard thermal paper rolls which remain widely available.