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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Welcome back to 1985 I guess. Now you're going to need a green phosphor CRT and a dot matrix printer.
I'd prefer a dot matrix printer over whatever the fuck HP makes now.
I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you'd waste paper and a lot of time.
DM printers were ideal in the guise of "line printers" - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.
We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)
It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.
In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.
Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn't get to see the internet. It just works. I won't be "upgrading" it for the foreseeable future.
My mom used to have an epson lx-300+ printer for her small shop, and it was awesome. We printed a lot of stuff and the ribbon lasted for ages. This was my only experience with dot matrix printers, and it was a nice one.
I think that may have just been a cultural translation issue. I can very much believe the original Japanese text did in fact suggest to hug your printer, especially back then.
My Epson RX80's ribbon is somewhere in landfill. The Commodore 64 however is all good and now sports a USB interface with more storage than the poor thing can possibly ever use. The Quickshot II joystick still works too.
1984ish was when the C64 was bought by my dad, from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen (West Germany, as was).
Picture the scene:
Me and brother fly home from UK to probably Dusseldorf at the end of the winter term. Its December in the mid '80s. Every now and then, Russia sends a Tupolev Bear or Badger to chug along overhead. The US sends a YR-71 over the USSR at multiples of the speed of sound. The Cold War was quite unpleasant to live through. Its quite chilly, snow tyres on the car, chains in the boot. The autobahn has the usual psychotic bunch of lane two and three drivers. Lane one generally runs at around 90mph (yes, even back in the '80s)
We get to home at the time (we move every two years or so - it is the way of things). Dad shows off the new gadget. He plugs the power lead into the video port.
Some weeks after we have gone back to school for the spring term, the C64 is returned from the menders. We get to use it in the Easter hols. It travelled to the UK and back to DE several times and also to Cyprus (WSBA). The QS II took a serious battering thanks to Daley Thompson's decathalon.
I got it re-capped in 2019, which was all that needed doing. They were rather well made ...
Unrelated song 1 and Unrelated Song 2
Wow, new fav song. Bo is such a damn good artist
Yes he is