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New technology hurts programming

I believe technology is a good thing. But, I do miss line printers!

After a long time, I felt the need to go through a long SQL statement to understand and debug it. I decided to print it and attack it with marker pens. Oh oh, new technology has made this a terrible chore:-)

Apparently, some months ago, our entire office switched to using only laser printers in the IT department. We use letter and legal stationary on HP LaserJet IV, V series. The good old green bar paper and line printers are obsolete and cleared off. Not even dot-matrix printers are available any more.

Apparently, some of my friends also have similar issues. “Printers printers everywhere, not a single one to print code”.

Anyway, I really miss reading code printed on continuous green-bar paper, using terminal font (not the fancy ones common today), with each line fitting exactly onto a bar - green or white. Continuous paper makes it easy to hold the paper up and quickly scroll it back and forth - much easier than flipping individual pages.

Does any one of you miss reading code listing from old printers? May be I’m getting older :-(

Posted: December 26, 2002 04:44 PM
programming

  1. Hi VS,

    Yeah thats true, i miss that too but i'm sure we will have to miss so many more things as technology evolves.

    I miss having pakodees at home on a rainy day too.

    cheers,

    Posted by: Anon on December 27, 2002 01:11 PM

  2. You said it!

    I also miss the continuous stationary in numerous situations.

    Posted by: Vikas Kamat on December 27, 2002 02:07 PM

  3. I print a lot of my code using a cheap color duplexing laser printer coupled with a good syntax color highlighting program like PrettyCode.Print for VB code and UltraEdit for almost everything else. Also, another essential tool is FinePrint to let you print 2 pages of code per side (giving 4 pages per sheet of paper).

    While not quite as handy as the continous paper stacks, it is fairly easy to toss in a binder and flip through quickly.

    My old Xerox M750 inkjet is also good for home code printing but it is dying quickly. Has anyone else found a good cheap inkjet for quickly printing color-tagged code? Most of the inkjets I've tried either have very light black ink or take forever to print out text in color. It seems all the emphasis seeems to be on color photography printing instead of good text printing.

    Posted by: Sanjay on January 3, 2003 12:52 AM
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