I used to do a lot of graphs and overhead transparencies with colour plotters. One of those would be nice too.

Yeah very noisy and pretty ordinary in print quality compared to today, but that’s half the fun right? Haha

I don’t think I could ever explain to someone why I have such a varied interest in old electronics!

I’ve have a physics SAC to do for conservation of momentum, anyway excel on my main home desktop decided to deactivate from the schools office 365 account (good riddance subscription services) so I decided the “logical” decision was to use a 486DX2 system I had been working on to do the job of making a excel spreadsheet for the calculations. So I spent last night installing windows 95 and office 2000 and getting it put together. By midday today I’ve done all the calculations in the tables I put together so I just copied the file to a floppy disk and used a floppy USB drive to get the file to my teacher.

He’s none the wiser about it.

So yes, in a pinch, you can use near thirty year old pc hardware for basic office type tasks

I don't have any 486 machines - they all died. I do have a whole stack of 500MHz Celeron pentiums though - they will probably outlast me - incredibly reliable hardware.

Remember when Centronics printer cables were $60 each? Now they are useless, and I'm about to thrown out my pile of them.

Hi Rob, re the cables, same here, I finally had a workshop clean up and gathered up all the precious cables from yesterday that linked pin printers and lord knows what together in a workshop network.
I have a big box now that weighs in at HEFTY full of centronics, parallel, everything and its all going in the dumper bin.
All useless now, sad.

Also still running desktop W95 on a games PC for GPL and Doom and do all my magazine writing on a WinXP like George Washingtons axe.
Had 2 motherboards, 2 Hdds, and 2 Psu's since 1999 but I still claim its original!

Fred.

Those socket 370 Celerons certainly are reliable, just their main drawback is their lackluster L2 cache compared to the Pentiums.
Also, interesting to note that the socket 370 CPU's were Intel's last to have exposed dies.

What's GPL Fred?

Hi, its "Grand Prix Legends".
I found it in 1998 from Sierra on line.
It is the grandaddy of a GP simulator software, set around 1968 and has all the circuits of the GP season built in.
It had a huge following with Lotus, Brabham, Honda, BRM etc ect cars and a full suspension and gearbox set up.
At the time it was stunning, needing a Pentium and a good video card.
I built a full size seat simulator with cockpit and 3 axis motor drives and warped the GPL program to interface with the seat motors.

That would be an interesting "special projects" article.
The seat still exists in the back of the workshop, must dig it out and fire it up someday.

Fred.

Ah yeah I have heard of that game somewhere before.

*I built a full size seat simulator with cockpit and 3 axis motor drives and warped the GPL program to interface with the seat motors.*

Wow that would have been quite the experience! Even today that sounds like a lot fun.
It would certainly make a good article.

Lance

Lance, yes it was an experiance to "drive " it!
I strapped a young guy into it once without him knowing much more than it was an "Arcade game".
He was ...meh............so?
Then I pulled all the breakers up that put the axis motors on line along with the multi channel surround sound plus the vibration shakers!
His eyes went really round and he would have jumped out but he was firmly belted in.
And that was just sitting in the pits!
You could swear you had a Cosworth strapped to the seat.
If you dimmed the workshop lighting so you only had the screen to look at and focus on, the whole experiance was quite something.
All made from junk from the scrap heap of course.
I'll put something together.
Fred.

I have one surviving dot matrix 360 column unit LQ1060. That is running (badly) US standard form feed. It, when used, drives off the XP computer. Prn built 1986, this has a fan forced air flow.

Far cry from their XP3100 and two others of different numbers in my friends circle. All of which decorate the paper with blotches & tram lines that any amount of head cleaning won't fix; I am of the opinion that its an endemic hardware software issue, as the tram lines repeat ever four or so lines.

Scrapped at 15Months. Don't think I will get any customer service from Epson as there must be more if we have three? It may be Duck Season, as that may prove expensive.

While I have had issues with Canon, the new one is a Canon with ink tanks G3660

Marc

The first printer I bought was a Canon BJ100. For a single sheet print faster than a laser because it didn't have to warm itself up first. Lasted several years until the mechanicals packed it in. Tanks were expensive to buy so went in for refilling myself. That produced the odd blocked jet but OK for most stuff. Kept a new tank where quality needed.

I've only ever had one colour printer (Lexmark) and it was such a PITA that I dropped it into the garbage.

A good quality B&W laser printer suits me just fine. On the rare occasions that I need a colour printout I use a self-service printer at Officeworks.

Canon BJ100.
I used one for 10 years as an job invoice printer.
I just kept refilling the cartridges with cheap ink refills.
I always had 2 carts on hand and when one ran out of ink swapped over.
Went like a clock until I retired from that job.
The thing must have printed a million invoices!
Then I retired and when I changed the work shop I moved it from its little shelf it always sat on....and it died!
Best printer ever.
Fred.

"A good quality B&W laser printer suits me just fine. On the rare occasions that I need a colour printout I use a self-service printer at Officeworks."

My way of printing too. Only catch with the local Officeworks is that they automatically resize your print which didn't help when I was trying to print up AWA symbols for the dial the lights in a Champion 429-MA. Took a few goes to get it right.

Regarding plotters, I wonder if, with the right ink, you could plot up a dial glass.

I have used an inkjet on overhead projector plastic but that is limited. If you see those Dot Matrix markings on piping & such these are paint jets. I fail to perceive with, the nature of paint, that they could easily mix colour and it would probably require a premix & more than on pass.

However, that is not saying, mission impossible.

Even the leading brands make bad models.

I bought a coloured HP Laserjet from Officeworks about 15 years ago and it was a great printer with top quality output every time. The only issue was that it was a fairly new machine in its model lifecycle and the driver on offer for it (downloaded or using the enclosed CD) was a POS and every time I rebooted my computer, deleting and reinstalling the driver was necessary before the printer could be used again.

Still, I probably got what I paid for - the printer, including the CD and the four starter cartridges was $350 or thereabouts. HP, and others, tend to make their money out of the consumables these days and virtually give the printers away.