How'd you get started with compuers?

I started out with an Apple IIe in school, but the first one I owned was a Tandy Color Computer (CoCO) II. Like Michelle it didn't come with a drive (tape drive) to save the programs you wrote.

In an effort to "upgrade" to a disk drive we went and looked at a TSR-80 to buy for parts, not know they couldn't be used together. The TRS-80 came with an array of 3 drive, an 8" monitor, a 1 ton 9pin dot-matrix (remember those) printer, and an expansion kit that took it to 16k of memory. The DOS boot disks didn't work. I had to start the boot process on one disk and while it was still spinning switch to a different disk and if you timed it right you could get DOS to boot.

We ended up going to a Tandy 1000sx with an Apple emulator board. The emulator board never really worked so we returned it and bought a real Apple IIe from a PC store that went out of business.

We added some used 10meg hard drives hanging external with an external power supply that we salvaged from a 2 ton hard assembly from a mainframe. The drives were so worn out that the starter windings on the motor smoked one day and the only way to start the drive was to manually spin up the motor with your finger. Thats when motors weren't enclosed. We ran that way for aboout a year until we had enough money to upgrade to a single 45meg drive.

Oh the memories...

As a young'un in Jr High, we had a keyboard and a printer that was hooked to a mainframe at UW-La Crosse. They let us play a Star Trek game on it during study hall. When you ran out of paper you flipped it over and fed it through again. Some days I miss the old ribbon and tractor feed dot matrix printers! Imagine that, no monitor! The next year the school came out with the Apple II's. We had to take a test and have a 'license' to use them. It's been all downhill since then. In high school I got ahold of an IBM PC. In theory I was supposed to be learning to type on it but I was actually playing a flight simulator game. I crashed a lot. Then life got in the way. My next foray in to computers was around 90 when I got my hands on a 80286. 12Mhz processor and a 10 megabyte harddrive. I ran a BBS, The Captains Chair using a BBS program called Searchlight. I even attended a sysops meeting in La Crosse once. The computers pretty much drew me back to an interest in CB radio which in turn led me to ham radio and now I'm just all over the gadget culture. I took some programming classes in college, but never really did anything with computers for money until recently.

I ditched the ink jet a couple of years ago. I got furious at my epson adter having to buy 2 new ink refills as the jets kept gumming up after a month of non-use. At $60 per refill it wasn't worth it. I ended up on newegg and found a Xerox laser that did 5ppm color and 20ppm b&w for $239 delivered. And it had a NIC to boot! Now some 3000 printed pages later I still have 1500 pages of toner left (approximately) and I'm done with the home ink jet nonsense. I would have spent far more than that on refills than what the printer cost by now.

I tried one of those refill kits once. Once was enough.

Heh, I've got one in my closet. It keeps the dust from settling on the stuff below it.

HP makes some laser all-in-ones, is it that or a jet?

Our first computer was a zx spectrum, that my brother learnt to programme on. I wasn't allowed to touch it much. I only really got into computers at university.

I'm thinking that will be one of my first purchases out of my geek budget once I get back to work (Color Laser) and I keep an eye on craigslist to see if someone wants to give me one

Generally color lasers are more expensive but over the years they have come down dramatically in price. Toner does cost more but it depends on the brand and what color you buy. Each brand of printer has a different way of storing the toner. In order to tell if toner is less expensive than ink you would have to determine what two printers you were comparing and then get the yield from the toner and from the ink. This is usually done presuming a certain amount of converage per page. Some inkjets have seperate color catridges but most have a tricolor cartridge. Bad thing with these are that when one color goes, the whole thing needs to be replaced. With toner, you only change the one color (usually).

Agree with the hubby, but as a general rule of thumb RA's question, are Lasers cheaper over the life, the answer is yes.

Inkjets are MADE to be throw aways, the nozzles are designed that if they sit for as short as a month the nozzles will clog and you'll have to replace them. Lasers (color or black and white) use a powder and heat to basically melt the toner onto the sheet of paper, while the heating element can go bad, they are made to be replaced, and there is few other points of failure in the printing itself (rollers are another problem, but again they are made to be replaced by the end user)

I don't know if they have them for the consumer level but Xerox makes small business ones and I think Dell might have some as well, but they will be much more than just a standard laser printer.