I'm fed up with printers and remembering the old days.

I hate printers, yet cannot live without them.

God I loved the old days with my Okidate Microline u82. I could feed in a sheet of sprocket fed paper from the case and print for months, only oiling the ribbon with WD40 when it started drying out. Then I could flip it upside down and do it again!

True it was crappy graphics...but still, it worked like a workhorse, never letting me down.

Then I had to have color, so I got a C Itoh C-310. Now my Printshop software could really shine. Actually, it didn't, but it still made nice 10 foot banners. Oh I had a few color printers back then. I remember an Okimate 10 which made these waxy, but beautiful pictures...and the cartridges were expensive and the printing took hours.

When I saw my first Deskjet 500 at the Sears store I had to have it. And if my wife wouldn't have put her foot down, I would have. Good thing she did, because just months later the 500C came out and I did get that one. My first color inkjet.

I never owned a laser printer during these days. However I did own an Olivetti typewriter that had a parallel port on the back and it would make typewriter quality documents since that is what it was, using a thin black plastic ribbon cartridge. Amazingly it printed pretty quickly...word processing at its best. And I could change fonts by changing the typing wheel.

Since then I've owned several dozen of printers...use them for a year, throw them out....they are cheap enough to replace.

One printer I loved was my Deskjet 5460. I loved it because you could easily print directly on CDs. And I also bought a CISS kit to use with it, and it was great. Till it broke. Too bad it didn't have a built in scanner. And unlike my DJ5360, it didn't print duplex.

For the last year or so I've been using an HP Envy 4500. I like printers with built in scanners....takes up less desk space. Still it doesn't print on CDs, so it isn't the best.

For the last few days my printer has been out of ink. I bought some cheapo remanufactured cartridges on eBay...one won't recognize at all, the other has streaky gaps in the printing. Wrote to seller, he is sending me out a couple of replacements. But what a load of crap to put up with. And I hate those annoying "counterfeit cartridge detected" or what ever that crap is. Seems like the ROM chip in my printer is more complex than my computer just to make sure I don't refill or buy used cartridges.

Anyways, I was considering buying an Epson Ecotank 4550 printer with the big ink tanks. And then I see that they don't print directly to DVD/CDs like their smaller XP-830.

So I have come to one conclusion, and it makes perfect sense...the printer companies are totally out to drive me insane. I cannot get a bulk ink cartridge printer with a built in scanner that prints in duplex in color and prints on CDs.

If they only knew they didn't have to go to so much trouble...I mean I was almost there to begin with...now I am crazy.

Thanks for sharing this, was really interesting to read

I should've stuck with Lexmark printers. When I finally decided to join the 21st century and get a network-capable printer, I picked up an Epson Stylus NX510 (on sale, but still pretty expensive) a few years ago. It printed successfully over my home network a grand total of one time - the first time. Haven't been able to print over a network since. Epson tech support was absolutely no help. The printer cartridges are tiny but expensive, and I have to keep removing them and wiping the ink port because the ink dries and crusts over.

Rich, are you saying that you're also fed up with remembering the old days?

No, I loved the old days. I don't think anyone born within the last 20 years really understands the awe and surprise of the home computer revolution. It was a phenomenal era. Something new every month!

I still remember the hours of pleasure I had reading page after page of the Computer Shopper magazine, back when it was about an inch thick each month and the size of a newspaper.

Or the excitement of assembling your own 8088 machine from parts and owning your first hard drive....btw...the Mobilepro 780 sold in the Oct 2000 Computer Shopper Magazine for $748.95





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A 12 MHz PC? That sure looks funny nowadays. Heck, most H/PCs were far faster than that - even the early ones, well before 2000.

That advert got tears in my eyes. . .

I was born in 1989, and was 6 when Windows 95 came out.
I sure miss the dial up tone when connecting to the internet.

Then Windows 98 came, then the Me, 2000, and so on...

I sometimes wish I lived in the era when the pre-internet PC / UNIX networks came out.

Speaking of printers, I think my first printer was a EPSON inkjet, don't remember which model. It used to jam papers like crazy...


Edited by stingraze 2016-04-20 2:12 PM

I detest printers. Don't ever ask me to get involved in them.

This was my first IBM PC:
http://computers.popcorn.cx/amstrad/pc2086/

My first computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64

My first printer was an Epson MX-80

First printer was a Citizen MSP10, dot-matrix-ed well enough to get my graduate school to accept my thesis print-out. At U of Maryland, your graduate thesis had to be printed on acid-free paper so it could be housed forever in some English Dept library. The MSP10 passed muster and somewhere, my godawful novel remains legible.

Oh, the horror,
Jake

When I took my Masters challenge you had to not only print everything out for every committe member, but had to have all reasearch notes and support documents photographed and converted into PDF files, cataloged and burnt onto a CD/DVD...

My family bought a Commodore Vic 20 when I was in junior high (http://www.oldcomputers.net/vic20.html). We even bought the cassette tape deck accessory.

Then in late 1990 I bought my first computer: a Zenith Minisport laptop (http://www.oldcomputers.net/zenith-minisport.html). I think I had the 2mb version. I bought it with a dot matrix printer and ChiWriter, a word processing program geared toward math, science, and language applications. I was translating a lot of documents from English to Russian, and was able to type in Cyrillic with ChiWriter. I had one of the 2-inch micro floppy disks, but I never really used it.

Could you convert audio recordings on cassettes to digital files on the computer?

Ha ha...

I actually used a standard cassette tape recorder with an adapter for quite a while with the Vic20. But the CBM Dataset was much easier to use, so eventually I bought one of those before the 1541s came out, and could use it later with my C64. I remember how long it took to load a program...like forever...

That was my first brush with piracy...copying an audio tape containing C64 programs in audio analog format.

I used an MX 70 with my Atari 800 eoans ago. High tech stuff in the day. Computer Shopper was better than the Sears Wishbook!

I agree, better than Sears...where else could you get an 800+ page catalog filled with computer stuff for only $3?

Pictures below:

1. My Aug 97 Computer Shopper
2. Article in that issue about Smartwriter....it never made sense to me, I mean the reason I liked HPCs was the keyboard.
3. How about the going price of a Compaq HPC in the same issue
4. Finally an advertisement...wonder what all those computer repairmen are doing these days?












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