the non-existence of printer collectors was Re: A sign of the times

I actually have an interest in printers, but there are the following problems: 1) "interesting" printers are large and power hungry and frankly hard to find in isolation. When they are around, they are usually part of a large mainframe/minicomputer package and you can't get *just* the printer. 2) Printers were commoditized quite some time ago. Remember the Epson FX-80? (And later the RX-80.) A printer was one of the few peripherals that *everyone* who had an Apple ][/IBM PC (or clone) needed. (Paperless office, my ass!) As a result printers were one of the few things that could be commoditized across all brands of computers from micros to mainframes -- although it would probably look silly to have an Epson FX-80 hooked up to a mainframe! 3) People keep CPUs, they even sometimes keep the terminals. They just don't seem to keep the printers. I think it comes back to the commodity aspect -- people think that because printers are commodity, there's no point in keeping that "old printer". The CPUs and terminals are less common, so they keep those in thinking that they have something less common -- and they are right. But the irony is that because noone keeps printers because they're common, vintage printers are not that common at all. What people do keep are the printing terminals: LA-36s abound. ASR-33s still come up regularly on ebay, some of them in very good condition. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>