How does this thing still work?

Buy a Brother laser. That’s basically the meme printer at this point.
And that’s been the plan here for years.

Enter the HP 1350v Inkjet Printer

Once or twice a year, I actually need to convert pixels to print. Each time I think “Ugh…this will be the one time it doesn’t work and I’ll have to next day a laser” and bemoan the effort involved in digging this thing out of the closet and hunting for its power cord in the drawer.
We all know about the drawer. Full of wall warts saved from the discarded fate of their many matched electronic devices, yet anonymous enough to prevent identification and, thus, confident disposal.

Anyway

I purchased this printer in 2003? I believe it was my sophmore year of college, and the Epson printer which had come free with a laptop purchase died before the first ink cartridges ran dry.
A rushed trip to Wal-Mart (it was still hyphenated in these days) netted this 16.7 x 10.2 inch, 11.8 pound masterpiece.

FELLOW DORM DWELLERS I can now copy sheets of paper in my own room. In color. Observe my magnificence at 12 pages per minute!

Metrics

One cannot count the number of last minute ‘please please work’ print sessions where, yanking the paper from the feed tray, I’d sprint to class just in time to turn in whatever paper I’d procrastinated in producing. Nor could one count the number of smeary-appendage scans captured on its glass. I can count the number of dwellings (8) this printer has followed me to. I can also estimate 12 different computers which have printed to it, including everything from PowerPC Macs, Windows XP+, and *nixes.

It’s a rare piece of technology that functions for 20ish years without complaint.

So this past week I needed to print five pages. I’ve been so lazy lately that I usually ask a friend to print things for me. The desk space which used to be occupied by this printer has long ago been repurposed. The last time it came out, its pale-blue plastic was illuminated not by LEDs, but incandescent bulbs.

Update - a month later

I started this post over a month ago and here we are. This week, I needed to print five more pages! I plugged a fresh-built KDE Neon (Ubuntu) machine into the 1350, mentally prepared for it to catch fire or something.
Nope.
Neon detected the printer, the documents printed, and all was right in the world.

I had a bunch of other stuff I was going to write in here, but have honestly forgotten. So here’s me clicking publish (haha, in nano/zsh) just to actually produce something.
tldr; the 20 year old HP 1350v is an amazing technical achievement that HP should strive to replicate.

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