Atari used to "make" printers. By that, I mean they would contract some Asian company to make a printer mechanism that the Atari 400/800 was able to print to, and Atari's factories would drape it in plastic that had an Atari logo. In this space, if you saved a screw you were up half a penny, which was a big deal. The printers that Atari produced were famously rickety and very, very slow because Atari was a cheap-ass consumer company that indexed on price and didn't care that it took ten minutes to print each page of your 20 page book report for tomorrow morning.

I saw the boneyard of printer chassis that didn't make it through the qualifying rounds. They were pretty terrifying.

- One printer chassis had gone through several revisions, each revision removing some major component (a motor, a solenoid) until just the bare-bones remained. It was clear that each revision reduced the printer's ability; what remained was something as close as they were able to get to an abstract idea of printing without actually abandoning the ability to print. I'm sure the cost-reducers considered that, too ("What if we gave them a tray for a hunk of paper, included a pen, and the instructions said to copy down what was on the screen?") The Ideal Atari Printer appeared to be a single motor, some kind of print head and a way to advance paper (ideally also driven by that single motor). Wackiness ensued

Now repeat that for each minor bit-player in the Asian printer mech market, all of whom were hoping to strike it big by convincing Atari that their bare-bones claptrap should be the winner in the race to the bottom.

- There was a color printer that rotated ballpoint pens in a holder and drew vectors. I was intrigued about how this would image anything on the Atari's raster display, and this issue was no doubt the reason the mechanism had landed in the boneyard. Still, it had gone through several revisions, and no doubt the Asian engineers were thinking of goofy and cheap ways to spin that pen holder, sans motor.

- There was an enormous boat-anchor of a printer, which looked like it had been submitted by a former designer of army tanks. This was the printer you wanted; indestructible, capable of printing in depths of the worst Siberian winter. Whatever you wanted to print, this printer would go through hell, cross mountains, take the enemy city and eventually your printout would emerge, using whatever substance you wanted to print on. Paper? Bark? Stone? Sure, no problem. Unfortunately the shipping costs were probably crazy.

- A slightly less battle-oriented printer chassis looked like it had also been submitted to Apple, and had an interesting similarity to the ImageWriter when that was later revealed to the world.

Printers today look equally wacky. Just go to an office store and imagine what's underneath the plastic. What knife fights drove the reduction in costs? What engineering careers were left on the cutting room floor? There's drama in consumer tech design if you dig deep enough. You want to avoid these printers, they will let you down and force you to drive to Kinkos at midnight for the remaining 18 pages of your book report.

We recently replaced an old but perfectly working HP laserjet because we couldn't find new toner cartridges for it anymore (and remanufactured toner carts suck); replaced it with an un-wacky HP laser printer that I hope will last another 15 years.