![]() (According to, the HP LaserJet II “was a stunning success from the start and seemed to appear on the front page of every computer magazine. You had to snap in a new wheel every time you changed the font.īut the HP LaserJet II-whose technology, involving a laser beam that bounced off a six-sided mirror onto a rotating photosensitive drum, was so cutting edge that I hadn’t the faintest clue how it actually worked-now that was a printer! I wasn’t the only one who thought so. ![]() Any fool could see that my Olympia electric typewriter, with its dorky sans-serif font, was not up to the task. My pitches had to look perfect, of course. I was gearing up to pitch some stories to The New Yorker, for which I had longed to write ever since I was old enough to know the difference between Wolcott Gibbs and Alexander Woollcott (in other words, given the family I grew up in, about, oh, age ten). What possessed me to shell out that kind of money for a printer? But $1,795? I didn’t even own an electric pencil sharpener. A run-of-the-mill dot-matrix model, noisy as a toy locomotive and dependent on tractor-fed paper whose imperialistic billows annexed half your desk, could easily set you back $800. There was no such thing as a cheap printer in those days. ![]() None of this equipment was inordinately expensive, with the exception of the printer, a Hewlett Packard LaserJet Series II that cost $1,795. In one fell swoop during the fall of 1987-a swoop for which I’d been saving for more than a year-I bought my first computer, my first monitor, my first surge protector, my first floppy diskettes, and my first printer.
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