What's an Intel 4040 worth?

Yes, you do want one (or two) of those :-) I used them a lot during the '80s. We had one at work as our main printer for listings etc, and we sold a bunch to a customer who used them for printing pallet labels with barcodes and large text used on their production line for submersible pumps, in a dirty industrial environment. They were built like tanks. The print head used a patented "flexhammer" system, instead of pins the dots were made by leaf springs which had their ends bent over and shaped to a little square point. The springs were held bent off the paper by solenoids, which de-energised to print the dots, whereby the spring would shoot forward against the paper to make the dot and then rebound and be held by the magnet again. They claimed the printheads had a life of a billion characters or something like that. They would print on just about anything up to thin card, provided it had tractor feed holes. They were absolutely indestructible, you could probably run over it with a lorry without even denting it. The only thing that ever broke was a small bulb in an optical encoder on the carriage motor, that had to be replaced about every other year. There were two models, the 4540 which was two-colour (black and red), and the 4544 which was four-colour with a very wide ribbon. Ours had the serial interface board with barcode option, which had its own processor to generate graphics, very large characters and barcodes. I can't remember them using 4040s though, I think ours had a Z80 on the main board and another on the interface board. I may be wrong though. You would love one, I'm sure I would if I could find one and if I had room for it... Absolutely the nicest printer I have ever seen. /Jonas