My recent experiences swapping old laser printer parts around reminds me of what I used to do for fun, which was abuse of office equipment. Printing technology has been a point of interest for me. In concept, transferring digitally written words to a page seems simple. The devil is massively in the details: things like how to render a font at a given size, space margins on a piece of paper moving through a printer, drawing smooth lines at an arbitrary resolution, color matching, and lining up hundreds of tiny rollers in such a way that a piece of paper doesn't jam all have to be in place for a printer to work.
All this complex engineering just so we can print mom's mac'n cheese recipe.
I have had a particularly long history of laser printers. In the mid-nineties, our family acquired a used Laserwriter Plus, a printer that we exhausted several toner cartridges printing essays, Boy Scout News Letters, and all the crap that a couple of dorky kids came up with to print and share with their friends. Mostly expressions of sibling rivalry and worship of the Marathon series. Stuff that would get us landed in therapy now.
One of the major issues that slightly stymied our burgeoning "creativity" was that the thing regularly choked on complex print jobs. You know, the ones that used every font on the computer (an number that reached into the low twenties, a ghastly number at the time, thanks to the Mac Bible CD-ROM, it would be years until we had internet access), and included many MacPaint drawings of things exploding. The Laserwriter, built in 1988, only had 1 megabyte of memory (though, it did have a screaming 12 mhz Motorola 680000, meaning that jobs with a small ram footprint would scream), and was simply not suited to that kind of work. The imager would crank for about an hour, print an error page, and then give up. 1 megabyte of ram was enough to print a page with 4 fonts and no diagrams on it. That's it. That is all that you could get away with.
Important childhood take home message: for laserprinters: more memory meant faster printing and more complex jobs.
(And use spell check. When writing long treatise on the vastness of your younger siblings foibles, you need to spell check. You are the perfect one, remember? Even perfect spelling.)
At the end of my sophomore year at Tech, I won a Laserwriter 630 at an auction for ~$5. The rollers were dry, but other than that, it worked fine. I soaked the rollers in silicone grease all summer and they got sticky enough to print normally again. With a 25 mhz 68030, ethernet, and a 8 megabytes of ram, it never hiccuped like mom and dad's old printer. I would ultimately print my senior thesis on it. Somehow, the printer made it to Baltimore, where it died curled up in a dumpster somewhere.
While the Laserwriter went to Baltimore, I went to grad school. New discovery: grad students print. A lot. Journal Articles. Manuals. Essays/Homework/Reports (during classes). Book chapters. Then more painful things like cumulative exam questions. Proposal drafts. The proposal defense. Then the many dissertation drafts.
I started dumpster diving for a printer within the first six months. I found a few inkjets that were hard to find drivers for and and were rather finicky. Then, my graduate adviser offered me the disused Laserjet 2100 sleeping in the corner of his office. Compared to the old laserwriter, it had a wimpier processor (66 mhz intel 80960), 4 megabytes of RAM, fed data via parallel port (that was cool in 1999, though passe in 2005) and no Postscript support. While it tended to choke on documents with large arrays of vector graphics, it would slowly and steadily churn out page after page of graduate school related dross. I kept wondering if it would die, but it only once wanted a new cartridge. Something which it got late one night while I was writing my research proposal. About a year before my defense, I found a 2100mp laying in the hall awaiting janitorial attention. I scavenged the cartidge and the postscript ROM/DIMM from it, bringing my 2100 to a wonderful 8 megs of ram and providing postscript support. Toggling between PCL and Postscript allowed me to print any document with wierd printing errors: if one didn't work, the other did. The extra RAM also hurried along the vector graphics, just in time time for the later chapters of my dissertation, which had lots of complex vector plots. The stinkpad's parallel port bares the scars of hundreds (thousands?) of plugging from the daily connection. I ultimately left it for other graduate students to enjoy. I hope it gets worn out before being thrown away.
There seem to be quite a few of these in existence. There are lots of printers from that lineage (Laserjet 6mp, 2100, 2200, 2300 and maybe few others are closely related) at work that are still functioning, long after the computer they came with was sent to salvage. While I think most of them are around simply because they still work, there are a few people who seem to love them because they still work.
At work, I have a HP cp1518ni... color printing! Compared to the other printers I've had, it's an interesting combination out of the box: light, cheap plastic feel, nearly empty "trial" cartridges, tiny normal cartridge capacity, but with decent print speed, fast CPU and RAM (Motorola Coldfire V5 @ 450 mhz, 96 megs of ram). The days of sending a big print job to a small desktop printer and then going for coffee appear to be numbered. Where the 2100 would cough up a copy of my dissertation in 90 minutes to two hours, this thing did it in 20 minutes .I doubt it will ever need to be upgraded, I'm worried it will far apart before then.
It's also possible that the digital age will finally find a way to replace paper. Then, it could last forever too.
Ahem.
ReplyDeleteThere are two keys on my keyboard that have suddenly come to my attention and frankly, I'm thinking I should get my linesman pliers, rip their little key caps off, and seize their stubby plastic selves in the steely jaws of the pliers and rip them bodily from the keyboard.
You may think this is an unwarranted, unspeakably vicious attack on a helpless computer? But, I assure you it is not unwarranted. I agree it is vicious. But then, if helpless is the opposite of helpful, then yes, it too is helpless.
I had just finished 5 or so clever paragraphs on printers when, as luck would have it, I pressed one of those despicable keys. Gone, and not in 60 seconds. Gone in an idle key stroke. Can that be right?
Don't crush that dwarf - hand me the pliers!
And now a word or two about printers. After all, that is what we're talking about.
ReplyDeleteI have grown over time to like big, roomy, liberating sheets of 11x17 paper. Yes, they are a little difficult to manage but, after a while, you learn to fold them correctly and they become quite serviceable.
I keep a small stack of them on one corner of my desk or another awaiting moments of graphic inspiration. Not Vargas like graphic inspiration but something technically imaginative and not quite so carnal. I find 11x17 to be roomy and comfortable. Unless its a really big vision I can usually get quite a bit onto a single sheet. Sometimes I use both sides but, with a little stack ready at hand and more down in the supply cabinet that's usually not necessary.
I scribble a lot. Ideation is nonlinear. Getting creative product into final form requires a certain amount of iteration. Eventually though, inventiveness has to be captured in a shareable manner. That requires a good drawing tool that supports rendering my work with computer precision and neatness on 11x17 paper. And that, of course, requires a printer.
I've noticed that printers are getting better and better as we move closer to a paperless environment. I love a paradox.
Printers and computers render my stuff and make it look great. Well, they do that most of the time. I have noticed that any time I have something that I have sweated rivets on and the deadline approaches that the printers balk. They balk several ways. Some fail to render images. Some won't feed paper. Some will render poorly. Others will extract a bit out a a sheet of paper and hide it in their entrails so that not only does it jam the paper feed, it can't be found to be exorcised.
Recently we had a Xerox color printer which I thought had the simplest paper path of any printer I had seen. The duplexer offered a certain amount of challenge but then, it was almost never a problem. This printer always worked. It always fed paper. It always printed the first sheet. The second sheet - that was the problem. Some of my co-workers absolutely gave up on using the printer. They preferred to use the one that worked reliably at the other end of the building. Printers can evoke severe emotional reactions. I worked with this printer for 18 months. I think a little, itty, bitty leaver that made the printer think it had a jam sometimes did not quite seat and the printer would stop with the 2nd page firmly gripped in he feed rollers. There was no rescue for the 2nd page and what follows is the manual evacuation of the entire paper path. Onerous, but, when those big 11x17 sheets emerge in full brilliant color, it was worth it.
Of late I've been keeping tables of data reflecting the state of various incident reports. They print out really well on 11x17. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have any 11x17 color printers available. Sooooo disappointing!
This week I spooled some of my treasured pages to the printer only to find that the printer had run out of toner and was begging for attention. The in house folk said they'd be along in a couple hours. Meanwhile I spied a Xerox Phaser 5500 nearby. It handles 11x17 too! So I go back to my cubelett and spool to that printer. I pause discretely to allow it to do its work. After a moment I hear the printer start. It whines a little as it starts feeding the big pages. And then, from across the room, I hear it make noises not too different from plastic gears slipping against one another. It is a grim, ratcheting sound. With a certain amount of apprehension I go have a look (what have I done?). There in the output tray are some unfortunate 11x17 pages. Some have been folded a bit before being printed. One is perfect. And, you know what the beauty of this thing is? It will do it again just the same. Time after time.