Transcript
A piece of paper on an old printer (a laserjet 4050 to be specific. It says: "Hello, My name is LaserJet 4050 and I was made in 1999. I’ve been doing my job printing your documents for many many years, however I think the motor that powers my paper feeder is bad. This makes me sad because I’m not able to do my job very reliably. As such, I am formally presenting this document as a letter of resignation. IT is working on finding a replacement for me, but for the time being, I apologize if I tell you I have a paper jam. Please allow me to refer you to my coworker, LaserJet 3390. 3390 resides outside of Ray’s office and can be reached at: <some redacted text> Please accept my sincerest apologies for failing. Thank you for replacing my toner and restocking my paper tray. It’s been a wonderful 14 years of working together. Much love, LaserJet 4050
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We need open source laser printers, to avoid the inkjet mafia as far as possible.
Printers are complicated and patent encumbered. Framework took a look at making one, and they noped right out.
Lots of tech more than 20 years old and thus free from patents available to use. Lots of office printers are older than that, still!
But yeah, making them reliable is haaaard
A dot matrix should still be doable no?
Afterall, most of the times we are just printing documents, right?
Just need to get rid of the LOGO requirements, or use a separate stamp for it and you’re good to go.
Is this Nicole?
Is this loss?
That era when HP made unkillable printers. Boss made me chunk a couple of these (think they were 4020s?). “But all they need is a $30 kit! Be like new for 10-20 thousand more pages!”
Drivers? ANY version of Linux or Windows would run 'em. Got a JetDirect card? ($15 on eBay.) Unscrew 2 screws, shove it in, turn it on. Boom. You got a network printer. I deployed Linux Lite in a kiosk for people to apply for jobs. Printed flawlessly, no downloads, and I sucked (still do) at Linux.
Anyone remember the LaserJet III, IV and Vs!? Does it power on? It works. Little jammy? Get a belt kit that any idiot, even me, can install.
Had a 36" 630c (model?) that was a fucking beast. Left it at my last job, didn’t want to tote it home and get new cartridges. The belts looked like tires popping steel threads. Still worked. Again, on any OS. That machine was top-of-line for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, was still flying high on Win10 with OS native drivers.
Got a P1102w work gave me 7-years ago. Beastly. Never had to fuck with parts, $20 toner cartridges still available.
15-years old, rocks out. Win10 had me wrestling with drivers for a brief period, updates cured it. Win11 runs it fine. And does wireless, if you’re a barbarian.End of a fucking era. The world has been stolen from you my young friends! STOLEN!
So you are telling me, that there was a time when peinters werent the hell-spawn that they are now?
Oh, no, they always sucked, but it was mostly a drivers/OS issue.
NT 4 and Win2k were about the peak of printer not-as-much-hell, but then Microsoft decided to move the driver into the kernel for Vista and later (maybe XP), and back to shit it went.
And then vendors tightened their belts and found every way possible to make printers even more cheaply, pushed hard on inkjets, and now it’s all worse than it ever was.
To be fair, they had their mechanical complications, too. Some more, some less but most of them were always good for a nasty surprise in an unexpecing moment.
my boss tossed a 4mp because ‘it was noisy’. Took it home, cleaned the belts, then continued to use it for 12 years before replacing it with a brother color laser.
Man HP used to make awesome shit. Damned shame what they became.
Another resignation due to burnout.
I have a 4000 that still chooches great. I just have to be careful replacing toner because there’s a broken arm that has to seat in the right spot to print properly.
It will be the last HP I buy, because I’ll be fucked if I buy anything that HP produces today.
Is this is repost from 2013?
I was kind of surprised to see one of those still running for 26 years until I reached that part of the letter, although in my experience those old LaserJets were pretty robust compared to the more consumer-oriented devices of that era, let alone today’s models which mainly exist to lock buyers into ink subscriptions.
What’s the point of selling a good printer when you can sell a much worse version for a little cheaper and with bigger margins, replacing the models at ever increasing rates but never improving them?
Or discontinue ink for printers that do run for years trying to not piss off too many enterprise customers and vendor locking them with service contracts in the meantime?
What about hoarding patents so no new companies can compete without the fear of litigation by billion dollar companies?
Most likely, yes.
edit: its from 2022.
So what was it doing for that nine year gap in its resume?
Printing, I’d assume.
I mean, electric motors are pretty standard. If the problem with the printer is a bad motor then you could probably just replace that part. The main question would be how easy it is to disassemble the printer to get at the motor.
Disassembly of these are pretty easy, when I did tech support for HP, I could tear one down to where I could access those motors in a few minutes. Newer ones were progressively more difficult, but the “business class” printers were always relatively easy to repair.
The difficult part would indeed be sourcing the correct motor, fortunately the 4050 only has one motor, and from a quick google search it can be bought for about $20.
That being said, I doubt it’s the motor - I never encountered a failed motor on a 4000-series laserjet. It’s more likely a worn roller, paper sensor, or the solenoid that handles the paper pickup that has failed.
This is what the internet should be all about, randomly encountering a guru who can troubleshoot and give you pointers to repair your 25 year old printer.
Much respect, sir. Have an amazing day!
These printers are getting so old that Windows doesn’t ship drivers anymore. I had a LaserJet 5si, and I took that as a sign that it was time to go. Yes, I could have done some tricks to extend that out, but if Windows doesn’t have drivers, then spare parts are going to be increasingly difficult to come by.
I wouldn’t be surprised if OP’s IT department is making a similar judgement.
I can recommend trying to connect your old printer to a raspberry Pi and seeing if linux printer drivers can prolong the life of your printer. Worth a shot keeping these beauties out of the landfill.
It’s long gone now. I did consider that option, but the spare parts issue is why I didn’t.
oh that’s a shame
If I remember correctly, this model had an easy hackable display. I changed ours to say “Insert Coin” but no one in our IT group mentioned it so I eventually switched it back. It was supposed to have been decommissioned but someone kept it around to print out short log files.
On April Fools Day many many years ago, I set the office printer (a sister model to this one) to say “Out of cheese”, which got one person very confused. I thought about making it say insert coin, but if anyone actually did it, it would be me having to fix that printer, and it was our most beloved printer in the office, so I decided on just the clearly absurd
Laserjet is a good, modern androgynous name for any child
I’d consider it for myself if I was still in the market for a new name.
