Old Buddy

I don’t quite remember when exactly I bought it but exactly 15 (fifteen!) years ago, I wrote on this blog¹¹ In Russian.  that it was working for me for fifth year. This means the printer has been working for me for almost twenty years.²² I seem to vaguely remember purchasing it in the beginning of 2007, during winter or early spring. 

I must say it’s a very good printer — still. Yes, it’s that cheap HP generation that holds no firmware and needs to have it loaded by the driver when switched on³³ Drivers are old, setting them up in modern systems may not be seamless. Works on Debian, thought, which makes it good enough for me.  which limits print-server compatibility, yet for a home office printer it remains a very decent workhorse. During these years it printed countless pages (including my wife’s theses and a whole lot of my own working material); literally countles as this machine has no power-independent memory, hence no page counter. It has no reason to stop printing in the forseeable future, either.⁴⁴ It should be mentioned that these models owe their longevity and durability (at least partly) to the legendary HP 12A cartridge. While those (or quality replicas) are being produced, there’s no stopping these little machines. 

Nor do I have any reason for changing the printer. Is is monochrome but that’s OK for home office; if really needed, I have color (and larger-size) printers at work… I can’t say it looks as good as new, though: the body panels faded unequally (must be due to slight differences in plastics), and as my daughter learned to walk, she broke off the protruding parts so I had to buy replacement paper tray and printouts holder online, they are certainly not OEM quality. However, in some (rather short) time one cound rightfully call this piece of kit vintage.

Which is actually both nice and a little surprising. I’m used to perceiving tech manufactured in XXI century as “single-use”, and computer-related kit even more so: technology progressing so fast you can’t really fight against obsolescence. And that makes seeing a quality engineering and technical implementation of what was already quite a mature technology (the implementation that outlived many more recent models) all the more pleasant. As far as I know, refurbished printers of about the same line are still sold (and bought) in Moscow.

It’s somewhat sad they don’t make them anymore, and it certainly will be a shame to retire the printer when the time comes. However, it’s not coming any time soon, which is gratifying; the printer is like an old buddy to me.

Must be me getting old.