zlacker

> Do you remember printing in 2000?

The impression I get from HN comments is users of monochrome business laser printers from 2000 are the only people who are happy with their printers :)

>>michae+(OP)
I use a monochrome laser printer from 2012, and I'm very happy with it, so you're not far off. :)

>>michae+(OP)
If you have a basically bulletproof monochrome HP 4000 series or similar that has cheap cartridges that last 5-10k pages, easy/cheap maintenance (a whole new set of rubber rollers costs $30-50, and is basically the only part that wears out), and a low printing volume, I can totally see having a printer for 20 years.

>>michae+(OP)
I've got a current model monochrome laser printer and I'm very satisfied with it.

>>michae+(OP)
I'm running on the same business color laserjet from Dell (relabeled Brother MFC I think) from ~2013. It's never failed me. I feel like every consumer printer I've ever owned was a giant p.o.s. . I regret not going business level on printers much much earlier.

>>michae+(OP)
The fallacy of "they don't build them like they used to" applies equally to bridges from 1850, cars from 1970, and printers from 2000: the poorly built bridges fell down, the cars with inferior parts rusted, and the printers with chronic issues got Office Spaced. So of course only the well-made examples survived.

>>NoSorr+i9
Same here. Mine is from Brother, probably their cheapest laser printer. No hi-res colour display or any fancy stuff like that. But it just works.

>>zdw+Z8
Same here. Happy HP 4000 owner. 1999 technology and it never fails. Maybe get a paper jam once a year. The only trouble I have is the plastic is getting kind of brittle and little odds and ends snap off but the printer still functions exactly the way it did 20 years ago.

>>paledo+Qo
Seconded, however I don't expect our best aqueducts to last 2000+ years

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-...

>>paledo+Qo
Actually the printers they are upset about in Office Space (with the ‘PC LOAD LETTER’ message, not the prop they smash) are the practically indestructible early HP LaserJets.

>>ryandr+QN
A sneaky issue with these printers though is that they use an excessive amount of power even when doing nothing.

>>pmontr+JP
There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin.

Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a fraction of the cost. They'll fall down in 100 years, but we'll rebuild them with something even stronger and even cheaper.

>>michae+(OP)
In the 90s I used an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. I think it was created in the early 80s. The thing used paper with holes on the perforated sides, so the sides could be easily removed but also moving the paper along is much easier like this. Actually it worked quite reliably as far as I can remember and some people actually appreciated the unique style of the printings in letters. Eventually I got a more modern printer though but not because it broke. It did support printing of arbitrary files but also supported printing console characters. Therefore it basically needed no drivers for default monospace font printing.

At least for the fun factor it might make sense to start with dot matrix printing. (I think it's still far superior to thermo printers ;-))

Really no comparison to modern printers in terms of reliability. I bought my last printer with 5 years guaranty upgrade. I'd ditch the printer completely if it wasn't still required for some official paperwork :/

>>jfenge+XS
Got any evidence/examples for that, where the cost of building for 100 vs 1000 years has been worked out?

>>jfenge+XS
Tell that to the cities who see their infrastructure fall apart after 20 years and can't finance rebuilding it stronger and cheaper.

>>Dissid+w31
I don't; I'm just spitballing the numbers. What really happens is that they'd rather tear down a building after 100 years and build a completely different thing. Even skyscrapers generally get torn down in less than that.

There is some infrastructure (bridges, sewer systems, dams) that are supposed to last longer than that. Bridges are often torn down and replaced, and it's probably more expensive than spending twice as much and having it last five times as long (again, spitballed numbers), but that's what fits in budgets. They don't want to discover that traffic patterns have changed and they need a different bridge, or no bridge at all and have to take it down.

That's becoming a real problem for sewer systems, which in a lot of places are reaching expected lifespan, and it's going to be ludicrously expensive to replace.

Incidentally, there are also reports that the Brutalist buildings are so overbuilt that they're hard to get rid of, even when they're bad (such as having insufficient ventilation). Gigantic piles of concrete will be there in 2,000 years, whether we want them or not.

>>cpach+hN
Exactly. Works amazing, no 3rd rate touchscreen experience. No badly made apps I have to install on all my devices. Just does what I want it to and nothing else.

My previous HP inkjet thing that this replaced was a complete nightmare and is in some kind of purgatory state now where it boots properly maybe 5% of the time.

>>Jon_Lo+K71
How little infrastructure works they have if they had to pay for it to be 1000x overbuilt?

>>lallys+Tl1
there probably is a middle ground. Just because i disagree with the rather radical opinion that claims it's most efficient to just barely fulfill minimum requirement and that throw-away & buy-new should be considered for civil engineering doesn't automatically mean i favor the radical extreme opposite opinion.

I am just stating the very obvious problem.

>>Dissid+w31
One of the pyramids at Giza was built over the course of 20 years by tens of thousands of slaves.

Taking the (shamefully low) minimum wage in the USA of $7.25/hr and assuming your employees work 40-hour weeks with 2 weeks vacation, that's $14,500 (again, shamefully low but let's roll with it).

Ten thousand of those workers costs you $145 million per year, and for twenty years that's some $2.9 Billion.

It's pretty obvious we could build a pyramid, which is basically just a hill of rubble with worked sides, for a lot less today if we only needed it to stay up for a few years.

>>michae+(OP)
I have a monochrome home laser printer from about 5 years ago that I'm happy with.

>>Jon_Lo+sr1
I think ultimately the problem is that infra is an investment in future growth, but the decision makers aren't accountable on failure.

>>na85+qy1
For reference, the Bass Pro Shop pyramid in Memphis cost around $100m. The largest pyramid in the UK cost the government of Qatar over half a billion dollars