Back when I was in college, a Hewlett Packard was the best you could buy. I remember when the Hewlett-Packard slide rule calculator came out at a cost of $500, which was the new reduced price for students.
I bought the much less expensive Texas Instruments SR 50, And it was quickly replaced by a string of less expensive and more powerful devices.
But I always remembered what respect Hewlett Packard held with the engineers, and how I wished I had been able to buy one.
Fast forward about 50 years and here I am scrapping out my HP color printer, which could not be saved by the application of expensive new ink cartridges. Evidently, it had some problems that could not be discovered by the debugging software.
Anyhow inside the Hewlett Packard I recovered hardware & electronic bits that I may find useful.
I also discovered about $200 worth of semi-dry printer ink just shot all over the spots of the printer reserved for head cleaning residue, by the pneumatic head cleaning system.
But this is what ticks me off.
Buried deep inside the printer where you could never find it and change it is a cheap little battery.
An ordinary person simply could not get the machine apart far enough, for the lack of instructions and miniature tools.
Now I will admit that I have seen these batteries last a long time in some devices, and I have seen them fail quickly in others.
But I think it’s so mean that they didn’t allow for easy battery replacement on the machine this complicated.
There is an amazing amount of product engineering hours and production tooling engineering and construction that goes into the construction of this machine, not including any actual computer code or electronic work, or the absolute modern miracle of Piezo-electric printheads that use vibrating crystals to pump ink through microscopic jets.
I am insulted to think they could not bother to include this facility, considering the mountains they have already moved.
I bought the much less expensive Texas Instruments SR 50, And it was quickly replaced by a string of less expensive and more powerful devices.
But I always remembered what respect Hewlett Packard held with the engineers, and how I wished I had been able to buy one.
Fast forward about 50 years and here I am scrapping out my HP color printer, which could not be saved by the application of expensive new ink cartridges. Evidently, it had some problems that could not be discovered by the debugging software.
Anyhow inside the Hewlett Packard I recovered hardware & electronic bits that I may find useful.
I also discovered about $200 worth of semi-dry printer ink just shot all over the spots of the printer reserved for head cleaning residue, by the pneumatic head cleaning system.
But this is what ticks me off.
Buried deep inside the printer where you could never find it and change it is a cheap little battery.
An ordinary person simply could not get the machine apart far enough, for the lack of instructions and miniature tools.
Now I will admit that I have seen these batteries last a long time in some devices, and I have seen them fail quickly in others.
But I think it’s so mean that they didn’t allow for easy battery replacement on the machine this complicated.
There is an amazing amount of product engineering hours and production tooling engineering and construction that goes into the construction of this machine, not including any actual computer code or electronic work, or the absolute modern miracle of Piezo-electric printheads that use vibrating crystals to pump ink through microscopic jets.
I am insulted to think they could not bother to include this facility, considering the mountains they have already moved.