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Old pictures of our Atari 8-bit setups


chad5200

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1 hour ago, gilsaluki said:

Never used a modem before, wish I had.  Now i can't .

In the Apple II world modems were a key part of WaReZ, "hacking", BBS'ing, and phreaking. They were both frustrating and creatively inspiring at the same time. I learned tons of programming concepts by writing/modding BBS stuff. And they were great for collaboration for book writing. Took minutes to send a manuscript vs days via post office. They were frustrating because no matter how fast yours was, you always always wanted more speed.

 

While the experience of the heady days is hard to recreate - you can make a modem-to-modem connection with just a coupla 'sistors and a battery. Set up a BBS downstairs, and run a terminal upstairs.

 

Or, you can telnet into real Apple/Atari/C64/IBMPC BBS'es. Today! But they are going to run faster, not the 300/1200 baud speeds of the 70's and 80's. You also may not experience the ring and busy tones and the anticipation of waiting to get onto a BBS or AE-line for WaReZ and stuff.

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6 hours ago, Keatah said:

In the Apple II world modems were a key part of WaReZ, "hacking", BBS'ing, and phreaking. They were both frustrating and creatively inspiring at the same time. I learned tons of programming concepts by writing/modding BBS stuff. And they were great for collaboration for book writing. Took minutes to send a manuscript vs days via post office. They were frustrating because no matter how fast yours was, you always always wanted more speed.

 

While the experience of the heady days is hard to recreate - you can make a modem-to-modem connection with just a coupla 'sistors and a battery. Set up a BBS downstairs, and run a terminal upstairs.

 

Or, you can telnet into real Apple/Atari/C64/IBMPC BBS'es. Today! But they are going to run faster, not the 300/1200 baud speeds of the 70's and 80's. You also may not experience the ring and busy tones and the anticipation of waiting to get onto a BBS or AE-line for WaReZ and stuff.

That's how war dialing began.  Smartmodems tone-dialing repeatedly until the line was not busy, to access a bbs the second the user on it hangs up the line....  Then some guy decides to make war on another dude's bbs by tying the line up this way (the original DoS attack)...  Then programs like Happy Hacker showed up, which automated the process of farming access codes to long distance companies like MCI, Teltec, Metrophone, LDX, US Telecom....  Not that I would know anything about the Phreaking scene back then, being a kid with no money, a smartmodem, and a long distance bbs habit....

 

Jeff

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Thanks for posting this.  Your early setup looks just like me first set, 1027 Printer and all.  Never used a modem before, wish I had.  Now i can't .

That was probably right before I started fooling with putting up a bbs. I had a ring detector for the 1030 modem. It was in a blue project box but it isn’t on the desk so this was probably a few months before I put up my bbs.

I used the hell out of that 1027 printer. I remember the apostrophe was different than most of the current typewriters apostrophe and I took a bunch of heat from teachers who demanded my papers be typed up! (Can you imagine that in today’s day and age) They always complained that the apostrophe wasn’t right and would claim I used a dot matrix printer which for someone reason was off limits in the mid 80s.
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Been going through some of my parents old pics.  Found these two from the past.
 
The second one was by original rig before I put up the Alcatraz bbs, and the first one is a pic of my Percom RFD with Mitsubishi Quads and a Supra 10 Meg Hd.  Along With the old Lightning 2400 Baud Modem.
 
img20200712_12424946.thumb.jpg.9d9c4c7466929d7ad74d4c1f14adefd0.jpg
img20200712_12423339.thumb.jpg.6aba4ee6e9566b188bfc708309b10de0.jpg

If anyone in the Lehigh valley area of Pennsylvania knows who bought all this stuff off of me let me know. I would love to try to track down the last known owners of my beloved Percom and quads. Lol

I am thinking it was sold late 1989 early 1990. There was also an astra 2001, usr 9600 baud modem and a metal blue box with all my software.
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3 hours ago, moonlight_mile said:

I used the hell out of that 1027 printer. I remember the apostrophe was different than most of the current typewriters apostrophe and I took a bunch of heat from teachers who demanded my papers be typed up! (Can you imagine that in today’s day and age) They always complained that the apostrophe wasn’t right and would claim I used a dot matrix printer which for someone reason was off limits in the mid 80s.

 

Oh there were reasons. Just not justifiable ones.

 

I hated that attitude the schools had back in the day. It served no purpose other than to say "I'm controlling you" and you can't change it. Some poor excuses for an educator were, "the perforations catch and cling to other students' papers" or " it looks sloppy and cheap. If only they could see today's workforce and its output!

 

Teachers wouldn't let me use my Apple II (Atari for you guys) word processor because the resulting paper didn't look professional. Too much "flash" from where you tore off the side tractor guidestrips/peforations and especially where the fanfold paper got ripped into individual sheets. At least that was one of the excuses. In reality they just didn't want the kids to have it too easy. They were even jealous of kids having better tech at home then they did themselves.

 

Some old bag was quite smug with herself when she refused my paper on the 2nd to last day because of that. It was 3 or 4 pages long and she thought I wouldn't be able to transcribe it back to handwritten because there was too much other homework due. Well I surprised the bitch by manually feeding real typing paper through. It was an Epson MX-80 F/T model that accepted both types of paper.

 

I thought I was done. But no! The next complaint was that the ink wasn't dark enough and looked liked it was done on a computer. No computers allows. Well fuck you. So on the last day I turned it in after re-printing it in the 1/216th advancement mode where the printer ticks the paper forward by a quarter-dot or something small like that and turned on double-strike. Now it was looking like a real typewriter! But it took considerably longer to print. But that's ok. I went out to play with construction trucks in the mud or shoot of model rockets while it printed.

 

Last day I turned in a perfect paper. Got a good grade and the set-in-her-ways witch thought she'd won. No computers! I took the chance of leaving a 1" strip of the tractor guide on the last page, folded over and back. No one would see it unless it was looked for.

 

So we all left class and when I passed the desk I proudly showed the paper with the strip on it. The bitch started fuming but couldn't do a damned thing. All my classmates had seen everyone else's grades or marks that it was turned in.

 

Got home and found a message complaining on the answering machine. I erased it. And stayed on alert for several days clicking the phone hook whenever it would ring. No matter who was calling. Especially the school.

 

Eventually my parents had to go in and "explain" that I should be allowed to figure out efficient ways of doing things while meeting practical requirements. Emphasis on practical. And that I had done so two times during this incident.

 

I wouldn't encounter any other resistance to technology till high-school. In those secondary prisons no one could get into micro lab unless you had near straight A's especially in mathematics. I never could understand that. Computers did so much more besides push numbers around. They did operations on sound, text, and graphics! And more. And 3/4ths of the lab was always empty no matter what time day you passed by. Must have been a dumb school.

 

After a lot of complaints they set up a "data-processing" class. Essentially a pacifier. A death sentence to anyone that wanted to learn about computing in general. I took the class anyways

 

And of course this resistance to progress was passed down to calculators. Or maybe it migrated up from them from the start. In the "higher" math courses we had to incomprehensibly be bogged down with manual drudgework. Never really being given enough time to focus on a concept or grow an idea. It especially hurt the slower (but still smart) kids.

 

Surprisingly this (along with the no printout rule) was prevalent in the shop/electronics class too. I know this instructor didn't have a computer at home and that must have jarred his preserves but good - that his students did. Well.. I went through that same "word processor crap" all over again. This antitech attitude was really getting to me. So misplaced I totally lost interest. Shortly thereafter it was a relief to discover in college that it was alright. And that calculators and word processors were just tools to be used as one saw fit.

 

I was "happily" out-classed by fellow students whom had bigger and badder computer stuff than I did. Macs.. PCs.. BIG hard drives, 10x the size of my already sizable 10MB Apple II Sider. Those uber expensive and complex scientific calculators with LCD graphics (a new thing at the time). And even color printers! This was more like it! Now I had to get a PC too!

 

Can you possible imagine those attitudes prevailing today?

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Oh there were reasons. Just not justifiable ones.
 
I hated that attitude the schools had back in the day. It served no purpose other than to say "I'm controlling you" and you can't change it. Some poor excuses for an educator were, "the perforations catch and cling to other students' papers" or " it looks sloppy and cheap. If only they could see today's workforce and its output!
 
Teachers wouldn't let me use my Apple II (Atari for you guys) word processor because the resulting paper didn't look professional. Too much "flash" from where you tore off the side tractor guidestrips/peforations and especially where the fanfold paper got ripped into individual sheets. At least that was one of the excuses. In reality they just didn't want the kids to have it too easy. They were even jealous of kids having better tech at home then they did themselves.
 
Some old bag was quite smug with herself when she refused my paper on the 2nd to last day because of that. It was 3 or 4 pages long and she thought I wouldn't be able to transcribe it back to handwritten because there was too much other homework due. Well I surprised the bitch by manually feeding real typing paper through. It was an Epson MX-80 F/T model that accepted both types of paper.
 
I thought I was done. But no! The next complaint was that the ink wasn't dark enough and looked liked it was done on a computer. No computers allows. Well fuck you. So on the last day I turned it in after re-printing it in the 1/216th advancement mode where the printer ticks the paper forward by a quarter-dot or something small like that and turned on double-strike. Now it was looking like a real typewriter! But it took considerably longer to print. But that's ok. I went out to play with construction trucks in the mud or shoot of model rockets while it printed.
 
Last day I turned in a perfect paper. Got a good grade and the set-in-her-ways witch thought she'd won. No computers! I took the chance of leaving a 1" strip of the tractor guide on the last page, folded over and back. No one would see it unless it was looked for.
 
So we all left class and when I passed the desk I proudly showed the paper with the strip on it. The bitch started fuming but couldn't do a damned thing. All my classmates had seen everyone else's grades or marks that it was turned in.
 
Got home and found a message complaining on the answering machine. I erased it. And stayed on alert for several days clicking the phone hook whenever it would ring. No matter who was calling. Especially the school.
 
Eventually my parents had to go in and "explain" that I should be allowed to figure out efficient ways of doing things while meeting practical requirements. Emphasis on practical. And that I had done so two times during this incident.
 
I wouldn't encounter any other resistance to technology till high-school. In those secondary prisons no one could get into micro lab unless you had near straight A's especially in mathematics. I never could understand that. Computers did so much more besides push numbers around. They did operations on sound, text, and graphics! And more. And 3/4ths of the lab was always empty no matter what time day you passed by. Must have been a dumb school.
 
After a lot of complaints they set up a "data-processing" class. Essentially a pacifier. A death sentence to anyone that wanted to learn about computing in general. I took the class anyways
 
And of course this resistance to progress was passed down to calculators. Or maybe it migrated up from them from the start. In the "higher" math courses we had to incomprehensibly be bogged down with manual drudgework. Never really being given enough time to focus on a concept or grow an idea. It especially hurt the slower (but still smart) kids.
 
Surprisingly this (along with the no printout rule) was prevalent in the shop/electronics class too. I know this instructor didn't have a computer at home and that must have jarred his preserves but good - that his students did. Well.. I went through that same "word processor crap" all over again. This antitech attitude was really getting to me. So misplaced I totally lost interest. Shortly thereafter it was a relief to discover in college that it was alright. And that calculators and word processors were just tools to be used as one saw fit.
 
I was "happily" out-classed by fellow students whom had bigger and badder computer stuff than I did. Macs.. PCs.. BIG hard drives, 10x the size of my already sizable 10MB Apple II Sider. Those uber expensive and complex scientific calculators with LCD graphics (a new thing at the time). And even color printers! This was more like it! Now I had to get a PC too!
 
Can you possible imagine those attitudes prevailing today?

Well said. I do know a big complaint was the tractor feed “crumbs”. The 1027 printer used regular paper and I know on my epson printer I did use the tractor feed paper that left “virtually” no fragments when the feeds were removed. That was a big selling point for that paper.
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I remember handing in a biology report in 1987/88, done with ATARI Writer. Left some empty lines here and there in the text for the pictures and diagrams to be either glued in or drawn in later (!!!). Teacher accepted it without any complaints; I think she was even impressed how far with technology some students were (hahaha!). Our school back then had 6 Apple II Clones, and a year later, 20 or so IBM PCs.

Topic was "The Ozone Hole over the Antarctica", big thing back then (and still, besides other nasty thing like global warming). Most other student had their reports handwritter or meticulosly typed on a typewriter. Lucky me, with an 600XL, 64K, ATARI Writer and a 9pin printer!

 

If anyone would've told me that my job would end up in uncountable Powerpoint presentations per week (btw: I love to speak to/teach people), using MS teams (WTF is that, from a 1988 perspective?!) daily dozens of times, I would not believed him. I am an architect, working as Head of QM (that ISO 9001 stuff) in an engineering company operating worldwide. And I love it!

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Ozone hole.. Shit! That reminded me of a neighbor we had 2 houses down the block. They got wind of the Ozone Hole and promptly covered up their air conditioner with this HUGE bag. Big enough that the thing still worked albeit at greatly reduced efficiency. It was completely and totally ridiculous.

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On 7/13/2020 at 6:58 PM, FlorianD said:

I remember handing in a biology report in 1987/88, done with ATARI Writer. Left some empty lines here and there in the text for the pictures and diagrams to be either glued in or drawn in later (!!!). Teacher accepted it without any complaints; I think she was even impressed how far with technology some students were (hahaha!). Our school back then had 6 Apple II Clones, and a year later, 20 or so IBM PCs.

Topic was "The Ozone Hole over the Antarctica", big thing back then (and still, besides other nasty thing like global warming). Most other student had their reports handwritter or meticulosly typed on a typewriter. Lucky me, with an 600XL, 64K, ATARI Writer and a 9pin printer!

 

If anyone would've told me that my job would end up in uncountable Powerpoint presentations per week (btw: I love to speak to/teach people), using MS teams (WTF is that, from a 1988 perspective?!) daily dozens of times, I would not believed him. I am an architect, working as Head of QM (that ISO 9001 stuff) in an engineering company operating worldwide. And I love it!

My typing teacher was, well, she was tough.  I called her the B*(ch of Buchenwald.  She assigned me 100 paragraphs, all the same, to type for a penalty.  I entered the paragraph once, and wrote a little program to generate random mistakes here and there to make it look right, then ran it off on my KX-p1091i in letter quality mode.  She bought it hook, line, and sinker.

 

Jeff

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50 minutes ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

My typing teacher was, well, she was tough.  I called her the B*(ch of Buchenwald.  She assigned me 100 paragraphs, all the same, to type for a penalty.  I entered the paragraph once, and wrote a little program to generate random mistakes here and there to make it look right, then ran it off on my KX-p1091i in letter quality mode.  She bought it hook, line, and sinker.

 

Jeff

 

Probably learned some programming tidbit in the process too. It's a hallmark of efficiency doing things the lazy way.

 

Did you go play Atari with all the time you saved?

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15 hours ago, Keatah said:

 

Probably learned some programming tidbit in the process too. It's a hallmark of efficiency doing things the lazy way.

 

Did you go play Atari with all the time you saved?

I'm sure I spent at least the amount of time doing the sneaky bit of making random 'mistakes' in the printout as I would have done if I'd actually manually entered  the 100 paragraphs.  It was a lot more fun doing it my way though, and I DID learn.  String manipulation in Atari Basic is pretty arcane.  B$(LEN(B$-X)=......  i did a couple of programs on the pea sea in Qbasic in the early 1990's for my company's inventory system.  The barcode guns used a different delimiter than the inventory control software, so I made a simple routine to eat the output from the barcode guns and spit out properly formatted input for RealWorld/Synchronics software and it worked!  All I did was go to the store and buy a quickbasic guidebook as Qbasic has Left/Mid/Right string instead of Atari's absolute references.  It was cake to learn to do it in Qbasic once I'd already done it the hard(er) way.

 

Best,

 

Jeff

 

 

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That's cool.  I remember my English teachers in late grade school and junior high having a "no printer artifacts"(dot matrix feed ribbons, rough edges, etc) requirement so the most i had to do was paper cutter the edges off or something similar.  

 

These stories are great....I'd love to hear more....

 

 

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20 hours ago, David_P said:

Doing some cleanup, and found this: the price list from Irwin Electronics (Canadian Atari distributor) from January 1st, 1983.  (Divide by about 1.25 to convert from Canadian dollars into US dollars).

Atari Canada 1983 Price List.pdf 1.46 MB · 8 downloads

Insane prices! Almost $500 for a 1020 Printer/Plotter.  A few years later you could get them for $15.

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22 hours ago, gilsaluki said:

Insane prices! Almost $500 for a 1020 Printer/Plotter.  A few years later you could get them for $15.

When those printers popped up in ads in 1986 or 1987 for 19.99 or thereabouts, I bought one.  It was rugged, accurate, reliable, and totally fun to play with.  A buddy of mine and I made digitizers for it.  Radio Shack had a fiber optic emitter/detector set and cable for $4.95 on sale, so we connected the detector to the Bpot input of joystick port 1 and with a photo in the transport with a bright light shining on it we could read images into the computer.  Playboy photos of course.

 

Jeff

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Mi Historia con Atari

El primer computador que tuve fue el Atari 800Xl en Agosto de 1986, durante exactos cinco años trabaje con diferentes configuraciones de esta marca hasta Julio de 1991 cuando ya tenía toda la línea 130XE, debía saltar a los 16bit; la disyuntiva fue seguir con Atari ST, pasarme al Commodore Amiga o a las PC compatibles, optando por esta última opción que era la tendencia general. Como verán en estas fotos, lo mío no fueron los juegos, sino las aplicaciones, empezando con la programación en Basic, el procesamiento de textos con Atari Writer, la hoja de cálculo con Syncalc, la edición gráfica con Print Shop, los BBS con XE-Term y las bases de datos con Synfile, entre otros muchos más programas con los que trabaje, un campo que no explore pero que siempre me llamo la atención fue el de la música. Aquí les comparto algunas fotos que sintetizan esta historia.

 

My Story with Atari

The first computer I had was the Atari 800Xl in August 1986, for exactly five years I worked with different configurations of this brand until July 1991 when I already had the entire 130XE line, it had to jump to 16bit; the choice was to continue with Atari ST, switch to the Commodore Amiga or compatible PCs, opting for this last option, which was the general trend. As you will see in these photos, mine was not the games, but the applications, starting with programming in Basic, word processing with Atari Writer, spreadsheet with Syncalc, graphic edition with Print Shop, BBS with XE -Term and databases with Synfile, among many other programs with which I work, a field that I did not explore but that always caught my attention was that of music. Here I share some photos that summarize this story.

1987 Mi primera configuración 800XL, grabadora XC11 e impresora 1027.jpg

1988 por fin no más esperas cargando desde cintas de casete ahora tenia discos de 5 14.jpg

1990 Trabajando con Synfile los registros de una hacienda ganadera donde era el veterinario..jpg

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8 hours ago, José Antonio said:

Mi Historia con Atari

El primer computador que tuve fue el Atari 800Xl en Agosto de 1986, durante exactos cinco años trabaje con diferentes configuraciones de esta marca hasta Julio de 1991 cuando ya tenía toda la línea 130XE, debía saltar a los 16bit; la disyuntiva fue seguir con Atari ST, pasarme al Commodore Amiga o a las PC compatibles, optando por esta última opción que era la tendencia general. Como verán en estas fotos, lo mío no fueron los juegos, sino las aplicaciones, empezando con la programación en Basic, el procesamiento de textos con Atari Writer, la hoja de cálculo con Syncalc, la edición gráfica con Print Shop, los BBS con XE-Term y las bases de datos con Synfile, entre otros muchos más programas con los que trabaje, un campo que no explore pero que siempre me llamo la atención fue el de la música. Aquí les comparto algunas fotos que sintetizan esta historia.

 

My Story with Atari

The first computer I had was the Atari 800Xl in August 1986, for exactly five years I worked with different configurations of this brand until July 1991 when I already had the entire 130XE line, it had to jump to 16bit; the choice was to continue with Atari ST, switch to the Commodore Amiga or compatible PCs, opting for this last option, which was the general trend. As you will see in these photos, mine was not the games, but the applications, starting with programming in Basic, word processing with Atari Writer, spreadsheet with Syncalc, graphic edition with Print Shop, BBS with XE -Term and databases with Synfile, among many other programs with which I work, a field that I did not explore but that always caught my attention was that of music. Here I share some photos that summarize this story.

1987 Mi primera configuración 800XL, grabadora XC11 e impresora 1027.jpg

1988 por fin no más esperas cargando desde cintas de casete ahora tenia discos de 5 14.jpg

1990 Trabajando con Synfile los registros de una hacienda ganadera donde era el veterinario..jpg

Wow.  Bashar Asad is a fellow Atarian.  Who knew?! ;-)

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Luckily, I never had to be strapped with a cassette drive. When I go my 800xl I was determined to get only a disk drive.

My first computer was a TI/994A. I think it was a gift when they were dumping them for $49. I had fun with it and got the cable to plug in a standard cassette player to save programs. I absolutely hated it, for the obvious reasons.

Maybe a few months later a regional department store named Hess’s had a few of the expansion boxes. I can’t remember what they were liquidating them for but it was fairly cheap. (Not $49 but cheap enough). I wanted that because of the disk drive. Well, that was kind of a nightmare. We had to go to the downtown Hess’s store as that is the only place that had them. My dad took me but I don’t think he was all that keen of spending any money. We hung around for hours to get to talk to someone who could help us and when the guy went back to check if any were left he came and told us no. Whether or not they were really sold out I don’t know. Needless to say, after that my ti did very little. (I did like playing Parsec).

Then I got my hopes hung of on a Coleco Adam. That got squashed when all the problems with the Adam arouse.

Finally, I won $100 from a local radio station and used that to get my 800xl. I got that because. Student of my dad told him if I got one of those and a disk drive he could get me all the games that I wanted.

The rest is history.

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I found some old photographs of my Atari 130XE setup from around 1987 when I was in middle school.  I had my old 1050 and a new XF551, a SX212 modem, and Star NX-10 printer.  I also had a 1020 plotter, but its not in these pictures.  The little portable computer is a Epson HX20 that my Mom had bought from a surplus store; I remember taking it on a class field trip and printing out lots of fake biorythym reports for my classmates on our long bus ride.

 

1490934086512-0aee2d3a-bc7d-4d2e-b4e5-dc7e7aa278b7_.jpg

 

1490934161771-4c8a20fe-e18b-44af-a8fc-a0dda91b3e24_.jpg

 

1490934893775-4a9d456f-9800-4fd9-810d-d2f422b1783f_.jpg

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44 minutes ago, bcombee said:

I found some old photographs of my Atari 130XE setup from around 1987 when I was in middle school.  I had my old 1050 and a new XF551, a SX212 modem, and Star NX-10 printer.  I also had a 1020 plotter, but its not in these pictures.  The little portable computer is a Epson HX20 that my Mom had bought from a surplus store; I remember taking it on a class field trip and printing out lots of fake biorythym reports for my classmates on our long bus ride.

 

1490934086512-0aee2d3a-bc7d-4d2e-b4e5-dc7e7aa278b7_.jpg

 

1490934161771-4c8a20fe-e18b-44af-a8fc-a0dda91b3e24_.jpg

 

1490934893775-4a9d456f-9800-4fd9-810d-d2f422b1783f_.jpg

What kind of printer interface is that?

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