The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

local dealer or repair shop if you need the machine for your work. You may, of course, have to pay for an inspection. BACKUP II ❑ A Few Grouchy Words on Printers I sold my =daisy wheel=—a printer that prints like a high-priced electric typewriter—and replaced it with a plebeian =dot matrix machine=. Why? Because all printers, especially my 1975-vintage daisy, are a series of lousy trade-offs. And one of the trade-offs was about to be my solvency. The old daisy wheel cost a mere $650 used—quite a bargain for a machine whose latest models go for several thousand dollars—and Anderson Jacobson didn’t charge for minor adjustments if I lugged in the bulky printer myself. AJ, however, kept after me to get a $450-a-year service contract. Then, one day, a printed circuit board conked out, and the replacement board and some other work came to $300. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I told the crew at Anderson Jacobson. “Three hundred dollars for a printer that cost me $675 originally?” No, Anderson Jacobson wasn’t out to gyp me. Quite honestly, the people there had intended to make their money off me through the service contract; and that would have been fine for a company that needed a heavy-duty, industrial-quality printer to pound away, day after day, around the clock, without stopping. But for a lone free-lance writer? However fast I typed, I could never give them the amount of business for which its makers had designed it. So like destitute parents searching for the right foster home for their children, I looked for better, more affluent surroundings for my printer. I asked for, and got, $650 for the printer with a =tractor feed= thrown in for free—it lets you use big stacks of perforated computer paper without stuffing in new sheets when you reach the end of the page. The new owner, a Washington consultant, _understood_. He wasn’t just buying a printer; he was buying his right to an Anderson Jacobson service contract. My AJ’s successor was the Microprism Model 480, a sleek, plastic-covered machine that took up less space on my tabletop than some typewriters. In a dot-matrix printer like the 480, little pins hit the ribbon, making impressions on the paper. An “A” is one series of pins, a “B” another, and so on. The quality normally isn’t any match for the daisy wheel’s, even though the price may be much lower than a daisy going the same speed. “Prints like a daisy, costs like a matrix!” Integral Data Systems touted the Model 480. That was stretching matters. The letters from my next printer, a Panasonic KX-P1092, could _almost_ pass for a typewriter’s. It sold discounted at a local store for $489, just a few dollars more than Anderson Jacobson wanted for its one-year maintenance contract. Here’s what else I could have chosen—rightly or not: