the print shop robot returns!
I had Print Shop for PC. I made so many banners that I got a stern talking-to from dad about the cost of printer ribbons. Now that tractor-fed printers are completely gone from the home market, though, we'll never see those again.
--LAN3 Sat Oct 8 21:40:32 2005
i turned on the windows web desktop and set http://www.kisrael.com/journal.aux/2004.07.22.funtile1.html as my desktop background... it's fantastic!
--rosser Sat Oct 8 22:30:44 2005
Alternatively you could download the image itself, and then right click and set it as a tiling background image (doesn't work if you just right click and say "Use as Background")

Admittedly, it's pretty frickin' busy for a backdrop.

One cool thing is, if you unfocus your eyes it has a certain 3D quality...
--Kirk Sat Oct 8 22:40:26 2005
I got Print Shop working on an Atari emulator once, with a parallel port printer that could emulate one of the old common brands. And it didn't always work, because of the automatic ATASCII conversion done by the emulator.

I wonder if they still make tractor feed paper. They have to, right? And ribbons?
--Nick B Sun Oct 9 11:52:52 2005
Yeah, I think there's a small market for dot matrix, especially some stores w/ receipts...I'm not sure what the benefit is, because now the printers are fairly expensive relatively speaking.
--Kirk Sun Oct 9 12:50:21 2005
They do make the paper and ribbons, as far as I can tell-- we still have a handful of them where I work because our main database program for accounting is from 1988 or so, and still thinks it's talking to dumb terminals.

One of the benefits of having line printers like this is we can produce a paper backup of transactions-- a very lengthy noisy one, but one that will survive if a hard drive dies. Not that we do this-- too much printer maintenance is called for in that case.

We also have a tracter-fed forms printer, no longer in use and possibly broken, but it's adjustable and wide enough for 160-column paper.
--LAN3 Sun Oct 9 15:41:14 2005
Oh, and as far as I know, not having checked the prices, tractor-fed paper and ink ribbons are still incredibly cheap, especially compared to our equipment-lessor who charges by the page for all our giant HP MFPs and other laserjets.
--LAN3 Sun Oct 9 15:42:58 2005
Couldn't laser printers fake being a dumb terminal?
--Kirk Sun Oct 9 16:23:31 2005

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