I wasn't born just yet, haha!

I've had this in my backlog for a while now. If you ever move forward with yours, let me know!

When you think “this is terrible, maybe I need a new printer” it is time to change the ribbon…ink ribbons don’t die all at once, their print just keeps getting lighter.

And yes, people bought new printers instead of replacing the ribbon because the print from the latest model in the store looked so much better than what they had at home.

If they're anything like typewriter ribbons of the era (and why wouldn't they be?), a really long time if you re-ink them periodically. I don't think any of my dad's fabric ribbons ever actually broke, and he typed a lot.

EDIT: Not "professional secretary" levels, but a lot. Enough that he bought a Selectric II for use at home.

Do you mean last as in how long until they dry out or last in how much you can print?

It's usually linear inches of text - which depends on how much you're printing.

Back in the early 90s I've discovered that there's not really any backchannel happening when printing to a dot matrix printer over the parallel port. And adding multiple ISA parallel port cards set to same IO address wouldn't cause any hardware issues, but just spit out the same data on all cards.

Which meant, as long as no paper was jamming, I could send data all three printers I had access to at the time could understand, and would save 1/3rd of printing time by having everything spit out in parallel.

My mother (parents bedroom adjacent to mine) did not think that'd qualify as ASMR at 2 in the morning.

If you like that printer sound, you’ll love the FLOPPOTRON 3.0

https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY?si=roYiok0-UxLVk-8t

Author here, I didn't! I've updated the article to reflect the actual port (and have since learned the difference between the two).