16 Apr
2013
16 Apr
'13
5:26 p.m.
On Apr 16, 2013, at 8:11 PM, John Wilson wrote:
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 02:02:44PM -0400, David Riley
wrote:
People are still selling ribbons for Apple's ImageWriter as well.
That's not *too* surprising, since lots of businesses still want
impact printers for multipart forms, and at least the original
ImageWriter (I don't know about the II) was a pretty common
C. Itoh mechanism.
In any case, I have three spare ribbons, but the one it came to
me installed with five years ago is still fine for printing the
occasional text. I need to get more tractor feed paper (which,
fortunately, is also still sold, though finding the motivation to
spend $30 on it is harder).
And they're an especially poor solution for
text, given how expensive
inkjet ink is compared to toner or (easily-refillable) ribbon ink.
Seriously! I have a pair of DEC LA95s that I bought over ten years ago
(Jameco was dumping them cheap -- I got a third as a spare but have
never even opened the box since other than popping the 160 uF caps in
the PSUs the first two have been bulletproof), which I use for printing
mailing labels and diskette labels. A year or two ago I bought a wad of
spare ribbons just because I couldn't believe someone was still selling
them new, but I don't know why because the original 1990s ribbons are
still going strong... Last time I looked there was at least one vendor
online still selling
brand-new bulk ribbon (for you to wind yourself onto the old spools) so
there's still a fallback for TTYs or LA30s/LA36s/LA120s/etc. when the
ribbons finally get too tattered to re-ink.
That's pretty spiffy. I imagine it's handy for typewriter
ribbons if they sell the proper width as well.
- Dave