"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
06/02/2018 at 21:40 • Filed to: None
4
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"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
06/02/2018 at 21:40 • Filed to: None | 4
| 0 |
I present the Digital Equipment Corporation LQP02:
This was the only printer that we had in my house when I was growing up, a letter-quality printer that used a daisywheel, making the output look just like a typewriter. It came as part of the DECmate II computer (dedicated word processor really, but we had the optional Z80 board so we could run CP/M). A company that my dad was working with was buying 50 of these systems, and with that quantity the price was knocked down from $10,000 each to only $5,000, so he placed an order for one at that price.
During my freshman year at college I had an instructor that told us that we had to do one of our papers on a computer instead of a typewriter. I did as instructed and was marked down a grade because he said I used a typewriter and not a computer. What he was implying was that the only printers on computers at that time were cheesy dot-matrix printers. He was an english professor, not an IT expert, and made a stupid assumption. Despite my telling him that my family didn’t have a cheap printer, but only this fancy daisywheel unit, he wouldn’t change my grade. Ignorant fool. Perhaps I did deserve to get marked down a bit because I didn’t actually write a new paper, but instead reprinted one I wrote the previous year since I had it stored on a floppy disk.
Years ago I saw something about a guy who had a rare lightweight aluminum-bodied ‘50s 300SL Gullwing stashed in his garage. He received it as a college graduation gift, and parked it after a few years. I remember seeing TV footage of his garage and was not stunned by this rare and expensive car, but was more excited by the old computers he had piled up around it, including that old favorite LQP02 printer.