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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm revealing my youth here, but... when was HP good?

HP was legendary in electronic test equipment and early computers, calculators etc. Look on Ebay for HP branded power supplies or multimeters, for instance, and you'll see that they still command very high prices. And it's not collectors buying them AFAIK, it's mostly people using them-- even 30 or 40 year old gear. They spun off the test equipment division as Agilent (which still exists and is highly respected under then name Keysight) around the time their computing division started to go downhill.

LaserJet III.

This is all true. I always hated their deskjet printers, though. The First one I had was a Deskjet 500 and that thing was a massive turd with very expensive ink cartridges, and no matter how many times I cleaned the rollers, it'd still have issues not being able to feed paper. Shit design.

I had a 600 something C that was pretty decent, and my wife had a 720C that we abandoned because drivers got too fussy around Windows 8.1ish (the 64-bit driver in windows update didn't work, but if you got the driver from 64-bit xp, it would work). The color had stopped working, but not bad for 15+ years of service.

Has there ever been a good printer though? If there has I'm either out of the loop or sad that I'm not old enough to remember it.

I sympathize with this sentiment, I hate printers. Worked in a copy shop for a time. Hate em.

But there has been at least 1 good printer, and HP made it: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5

Also, 9-pin dot matrix printers were workhorses.

I think it's more printer _software_ that sucks. But we have three LaserJet M553 printers that have functioned perfectly. I think that model only recently went out of production and can still be found on the shelf.

I have a sharp mx c301w color laser printer at the office and it's frankly just great. Scanning, printing and whatever just work.

At home I have an Epson ET-M3170, it's not a laser but one of those epson thing where you don't have cartride but just empty bottles of ink into a tank when it's empty, and it works great too (it's much slower, but then again it's a lot cheaper).

It's mostly inkjet printers that are always terrible.

Brother Laser MFCs have been good for me for 15+ years.

HP used to make amazing monochrome laser printers. I can't really speak to other brands, but I maintained dozens of LaserJet 4000, 4050, and 4100 printers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_4000_series

Those things are tanks. Perform a maintenance kit on one of those, and it's good for another 150k pages no problem. The main thing that needs attention is the rubber feet that pick up the paper get dry. Some rubber rejuvenator on a q-tip goes a long way.

I have a 4050 for home, and I have no reason to doubt its future longevity. :-)

The firmware, though, is ancient (telnet, and a web interface that requires IE 5 IIRC). Now if there was open source firmware for these things...

their business laserjets were amazing but they started adding shit to make them crappy like time limited catridges and what not.

Before the 2000s or the Agilent spin-off, HP was the undisputed king in electronics test equipments. Their flagship multimeter HP3458a, launched more than 30 years ago, is still the standard in metrology. And Keysight (spin-off from Agilent) is still making them with little to no significant modifications over the years.

They also made some great RPN calculators.

And used 3458As (in working condition) tend to go for between $5000-7000 these days. The HP ones, not the newer Agilent or Keysight ones.

Very entertaining video explaining a bit about the HP3548a: https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ

Heh, back in the day they made the best calculators, test equipment, disk drives, workstations (early PA-risc snakes), etc. Even their printers were a unique technology using an HP print engine that was wonderfully durable.

Then they killed off the calc division, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't as profitable as ink. Years later they decided to upgrade the calculator (TI had won the market in the meantime), instead of doing something innovative they bought a new arm chip and ran an emulator of the old chip and used the old software stack with minimum polish under the emulator. Not surprisingly Texas Instruments laughed all the way to the bank.

Their laser printers were starved as well, again not as profitable as selling ink for ink jets. So the print engine was killed off and now uses the same print engine that you get in a Dell printer. Which was sad, they weren't nearly as durable.

It was sad to watch

Before Carly Fiorina.

A repeat offender. She also had a stint at Lucent.

There are tons of great innovation coming out of HP pre 2000. Do you enjoy using optical mice? Thats HP.

LaserJet 4 (20 years old?) still runs.

Do you have any non HP printer from 20 years ago still working as expected?

Not 20, but my 10 year old HP color laser is working as well as new!

I have an opening price point Brother laser printer from about 2002 whose drum is on its last toner cartridge worth of wear. I’ve only used it lightly since I stopped contracting about fifteen years ago though.

I have a Fuji Xerox colour laser printer bought in 2005 still running the same as it ever has

My ImageWriter still works, although my ImageWriter II gave up the ghost a decade or two ago.

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