MY OLD PRINTER
2011; Wiley; Volume: 99; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2011.0022
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoMY OLD PRINTER ANNE FADIMAN ANNE FADIMAN Francis Writer‐in‐Residence at Yale and the former editor of The American Scholar. Footnotes 1. I wasn't the only one who thought so. According to file://Printerworks.com, the HP LaserJet II “was a stunning success from the start and seemed to appear on the front page of every computer magazine. … There were always more new dealers lined up at HP's door eager to carry the most successful printer product ever made.” 2. 53.6 with loaded paper tray. 3. The talisman worked, but only temporarily. The New Yorker did assign me a piece (on an epileptic Hmong toddler), and it was accepted, but the editor was replaced by someone whose enthusiasm for epileptic Hmong toddlers was — not to put too fine a point on it — limited. She informed me of her decision to kill the piece in a (beautifully printed) letter that misspelled both my first and my last names. 4. I have expended untold bytes, in both online font forums and plaintive e‐mails to Hewlett Packard Customer Service, attempting to find a downloadable version of Font Cartridge P that I could use if, heaven forbid, I were ever to face LaserJet II widowhood. Everyone tells me that CG Times or Times New Roman is close enough, but everyone is wrong. My printer is like the last speaker of Pongyong or Twendi or !Kung. When it dies, my font will die with it. 5. My daughter, who has inherited the family proofreading fetish, chose the name not because there was anything erroneous about Typo but because she had read that dogs respond best to two‐syllable names ending with a long vowel, like Fido and Toto. (A friend of ours suggested that if Typo had puppies and we kept one, we could call it Stet.) 6. A LaserJet II is currently available on eBay with a minimum bid of $15.00. Its seller writes: “This printer has been sitting in a closet for nearly 20 years and was working fine before being mothballed. … Please note that this is one of the heaviest printers I have ever lifted.” 7. And when this one breaks, Canon will probably send me another — a newer, even sexier model. Planned obsolescence is a sensible business strategy. Why build a machine that outlasts its technology? 8. That figure is based on averaging the costs of a PIXMA page of monochrome text (4.6 cents) and a page of mixed text‐and‐color grapics (12.4 cents), as compared with the quarter of a cent I pay for each page printed by one of those LaserJet cartridges under the guest bed. This calculation, of course, betrays my favoritism by being egregiously unfair to the PIXMA, since the LaserJet II can't print color. If I printed only black‐and‐white pages, the PIXMA would be a mere 18.4 times as expensive. I tried pinching pennies by buying knockoff cartridges but gave up after their leaky carapaces left me with cyan or magenta hands one too many times. 9. Because it's more easily translatable to a form other computers can read, I do have WordPerfect X3 for Windows. I admit that it's not bad. (I also have Microsoft Word, which I execrate.) But WordPerfect for DOS is my first language, and I will never speak another dialect quite as naturally. I empathized with William F. Buckley, who developed an analogous attachment to WordStar, a word‐processing program even more ancient than WordPerfect for DOS that he had learned in 1983. In Losing Mum and Pup, his son Christopher wrote: “Loading WordStar into his up‐to‐date Dell computer was akin to installing the controls of a Sopwith Camel on a F‐16 fighter jet, but Pup could not be budged from his WordStar.” © 2011 by Yale University
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