It started with the death of an old friend. But don’t be concerned: that friend is once more alive, doing well and serving me faithfully.
It is an Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer, a classic of its kind. It was the first printer I ever bought, back in 1982 or 1983, and cost me far more money than I could afford. Even after it was replaced as my main printer — first by an improbably loud daisywheel device and then by an Epson laser printer that I ‘acquired’ in my role as a product reviewer — it continued to see service for niche applications.
Chief among these was as a label printer for my library of 35mm colour transparencies. I maintained a database of my slides, built using the Eagle package from Emerald Bay (a kind of friendlier knock-off of dBase) and it was far easier to print labels programmatically to the dot matrix than it was to mess with sheets of labels on the laser. That’s the kind of functionality I miss.
