The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Shopping For A New Printer... Retro Thing Style
By James Grahame
There was a moment in the 1980s when the idea of spending $500 on a dot matrix printer seemed perfectly rational. Even Apple sold one. Back then, computers were all about word processing, programming, grainy girly pics and games - not necessarily in that order. There were no digital photos to print, nor did the idea of printing a CD cross anyone's mind.
Fast-forward a quarter century and dot matrix printers are as common as steam-powered cars. I own a laser printer (the cheapest way to print large documents) and an ink jet (for pretty pictures). But the idea of whacking little pins into a ribbon at 80 characters per second seems absolutely barbaric.
Oddly enough, I'm considering buying one - a tank-like Epson MX-80, perhaps. They were so common that you can still buy new ribbons. More to the point, they work with the prehistoric multi-part tractor feed forms that the (Canadian) post office insists I use to send packages overseas.
There are numerous online stores that will sell me a
shiny new dot matrix for a couple of hundred bucks, but that
seems silly. I'll wait until I spot a nice one for $5 at a thrift store
or garage sale. I shouldn't have much trouble connecting a 25-year-old
printer to my almost new PC so my neighbors can enjoy its melodious mechanical grind from across the
street. Heck, maybe I'll even make some music with the thing.
