Читать книгу The Dodo Collection - Steve Stack - Страница 19

Printer Paper with Holes

Next time your computer printer jams, runs out of ink, or fails to work wirelessly, cast your mind back to the early days of home computing and the very first computer printers.

Huge dot-matrix blighters, with the most impractical and bizarre paper. Long perforated rolls, rather like a giant’s toilet roll, with holes punched at regular intervals running parallel along each side. You had to feed the holes onto some prongs and then hand-crank the thing along until it was in place, and then wait 20 minutes while a device a bit like Grandstand’s vidiprinter spewed out vaguely readable text.

Compare a printout from a Commodore 64 to the flashy colour stuff we get today. This is all in recent memory, people; we really have come this far.

If you ever had to deal with this stuff, you will never forget it. But I doubt that you miss it.

Dodo Rating: