Retro-computing seems to be fashionable, and I feel both envy and admiration at people who put old computer back into working order, I particularly love Adrian’s digital basement, to whom I send some old peripherals that were lying around in the basements (Jazz drives). I love the fact that people build and design new components for old computers, like improved, replacement ROMs for the Mac I loved most, the SE/30, or a board that emulates SCSI devices with a development board.

I recently found another box of stuff in the basement, an Dayna EtherPrint T LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge which I ended up sending to a museum. While this sound like very old technology, I actually still used it until 2008. Sometimes in the mid 90’s I had bought an HP LaserJet 6MP printer. After fuzzing around with InkJet printers, and Brother printer with fake PostScript I friend lent me, this was a solid workhorse: proper PostScript emulation, 600 DPI, it had serial, parallel, and LocalTalk interfaces, which was used to connect it to the local network with had at my parent’s home, there was also a SIMM socket, so I expanded its memory using spare RAM I had.

I kept this printer for around 20 years. While newer Macintoshes did not have LocalTalk interfaces, this was not a problem, as I had recovered the Dayna EtherPrint T from a recycling bin at EPFL. The printer was connected to the bridge using a PhoneNet (LocalTalk over RJ11 cabling) and later to Wifi Adapter. WHile the 230 Kb/sec of the LocalTalk network might sound like a bottleneck, truth is, I mostly used it to print letters so this was never really an issue.

The thing that strikes me is how dramatically HP’s reputation degraded. At the university of Geneva, our networking lab was equipped with HP Unix workstations, and I bought my printer based of recommendation of the technical staff of the university (I was working part time in university support) and was really good quality.

These days, I would not particularly recommend HP’s printer, they have a horrible reputation regarding their inkjet cartridges and their laser printers are nothing special, the company’s dedication to quality is long gone. In fact I replaced the LaserJet with a Brother printer, and when that one died, I took another Brother printer.