Choking on the stench of ambition in Washington DC
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Oh, this is so much fun. The one bad thing about Computer Shopper was scouring the pages for the best deal, making your educated purchase, then seeing the price in a free fall next issue.
CS also had some weird sellers (harbinger of ebay). I remember buying a tiny thermal printer. The form factor was so trick and it never once worked.
I happened to purchase a magazine called "bit", a Japanese Computer Science magazine from 1980.
This advertisement is something I'm not familiar with... the tape (as a storage device), and the big floppy disk. (Yes, I've used 3.5 inch long time ago)
The header of the advertisement says, "There will be a new magnetic storage medium to the micro computer. "
Back in the day you used to have to sit there while it played one side of a tape into RAM, reverse the tape and then play the second side in. Sometimes you'd hear the garble, sometimes they'd add loading animation/graphics or just flashing colours to let you know that things were happening. Then along come 8 and then 5.25" floppy. What a revolution variable access was. You didn't have to hold the entire program in RAM any more. If you could accept the access delay, you could go and fetch new assets any time you wanted without rewinding and linear searching of the entire tape.
The tapes weren't very big either; about 100KB I recall.
I bought a DeskJet 500C, and then a few months later, they came out with the 550C, where you didn't have to swap the ink cartridges (one black, one color). I never printed much in color, and the print heads always seemed to dry up between prints, so I would keep having to try to clean the head or buy a new cartridge. I don't think the new EcoTank will solve that problem.
I switched to laser printers years ago; I got a Samsung ML-2010 for $50 at Staples years ago, and it's still my primary printer. I also have a Samsung CLP-300 for when I need color.
Choking on the stench of ambition in Washington DC
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The 550C was a great generic driver as well. Before installing HP bloatware, I would always check to see if the already-installed 550C driver would suffice. Even now, with a Deskjet 3520, I can print fine using the 990C Foomatic/chp2200 driver in basic CUPS (linux) or the default 990C version in Windows. Has saved me much space and hassle.
My first printer was a Canon BJ-200e, purchased in 1994 and used until about 2011 or 2012. This thread brings back memories of the refill kits: drilling holes in the side of the cartridges and using the bottle with the needle end to refill. I'm sure I refilled some of them a dozen times.
I now have an HP P1102w and it works really well with the cheap toner cartridges I've bought on eBay. It's so much easier.
Here in Canada, we had a couple of monthly newspaper-style computer shopping guides, which mixed news, reviews, and opinion pieces with tons of ads. One was called, fittingly, "The Computer Paper." The other was "[Insert your local city name here] Computes!" I was a student back then. Given technology prices in the 90s, I did a lot of looking and not much buying.
