Dennis@home wrote
Johny B Good wrote
Rod Speed wrote

The first of them that I personally owned, an LA180 was as big
as a washing machine and I could barely put one in the back
of a Golf alone, and I was completely stupid to have done that.

Wow! I thought I was the only one daft enough to buy such a monster from
my local 'Government Surplus' dealer. :-)

I had to rewire the parallel interface (including adding an inverter or
two) to make it 'Centronics Compatable' for connecting to my Transam
Tuscan S100 Bus machine.

It only printed unidirectionally but the bi-directional version
wouldn't have sped it up very much since the carriage return action was
so swift it was more akin to its predecessor, a Teletype Model 33 ASR.

I think it eventually got replaced by an HP Deskjet 960C and I
eventually hauled it out of my basement 'shack' to sneak it onto the
back of an untaxed wagon that had been illegally parked across the
road for the past couple of months ( I thought that if we'd had to put
up with this eyesore which was seemingly being pointedly ignored by
the authorities for the last two months or so, I might as well get
some utility out of it :-)

That was replaced by a much smaller dot matrix printer
that I only stopped using when I got the first inkjet printer
that produced a much better result and cost peanuts.

I gave up on inkjets long before they 'got cheap'. The plain fact is
I simply didn't do enough printing to stop the heads clogging up
between jobs. I'd have done much better using a good old fashioned
impact dot matrix or daisywheel printer and a small box of re-inkable
ribbons (cartridge or open spool). The price of the consumables for
all inkjet printers is hundreds of times greater than that of the
impact based technology which, imho, is a total disgrace.

You don't need to print anything to stop them blocking up.

You do with some brands of printer.

If you leave it on the printer will clean itself as needed.

None of my Canons have ever done that.

My Brother aio has been sitting there happy for four years now.
It doesn't use much power as all it is doing is keeping the network alive
so it can wake up and print when required.

The ink level goes down slowly but you are talking about years if you
don't print anything. And as it uses optical level sensors you can refill
or use £1.99 carts in it.