[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Axiom Printer Card
February 23rd, 2015 by Benj Edwards
* Feathered hair not included
Ah, the good ole days when you had to pay $535 (that’s $1,744 in today’s dollars) for the privilege of merely being able to hook a printer to your home computer. What can I say — it was a useful feature.
My first computer, an Apple II+, came equipped with a Grappler+ printer card (from the previous owner), although I can’t recall ever using it. Instead, I printed school reports by that time from whichever family MS-DOS machines we had at the time, each of which included a built-in parallel port for printer use.
What a great day it was when I switched from a noisy dot matrix printer to the that awesome Canon Bubblejet we had. Silent printing! And the day we got our first full-color photo capable HP inkjet printer around 1996. It was pretty low resolution, but still amazing.
Today, I don’t print much. I have a color laser copier in service to reproduce scanned documents (in lieu of a copy machine) in case I need a hard copy of something — usually a form or contract — to mail.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you regularly print anything from your computer these days? What do you print?
February 25th, 2015 at 4:24 pm
About the only thing I print anymore are the occasional photo and tax forms. Sometimes I might print some obscure programing info for reading at various points when not home. But really, do we even need printers anymore? How many of us have them and never use them? I use the scan feature on mine more than anything else.
February 26th, 2015 at 12:45 am
At work yes, we do have a Multi inkjet printer, we use it very often.
At home not so much. 🙂
February 26th, 2015 at 5:49 pm
For personal use, it’s an occasional form, a resume, a picture, or a hard copy of an invoice. I wished I had a better printer back in high school, though. I had a Commodore 1526, which lacked true descending characters, such as a y, q, or p. I had an Espon daisy wheel typewriter that had an RS-232 interface card option, but i could never find the interface locally or in catalogs.