A very good investment
=======================

I think it was some time around 1996 or 97 when i needed a printer.
Urgently. I would have liked to buy one of those fancy color inkjet
printers or - oh how cool it would have been - a nice laser printer,
but my 14 year old me didn't have the money. But there was this ad
in the local newspaper under the "Buy and Sell" category where
someone in the nearby village wanted to sell an used Epson LQ 500
dot-matrix printer which i think did cost about 100 DM
... if i remember correctly. The printer did miss some plastic parts
but it did come with the obligatory single page paper holder and
an additional tractor feed.  For a few years i used it quiet
excessively for doing homework, printing TTRPG character sheets
and everything else.

Somewhere around the early 00s i finally bought an inkljet printer
which worked quiet well for a while, but ink was very expensive
and the printhead was drying out quickly if i didn't print something
for one or two weeks. While it was quiet nice to be able to now
print nice color pictures, it got more and more annoying over the
time. I think i tried out two or three (increasingly cheaper) models
over the coming 10 years but it got just more frustrating. I am
pretty sure it was around 2014 or 2015 when i was unemployed and
- again, urgently - needed something to print out job applications
i remembered that there was this dot-matrix printer sitting in the
attic at my parents place.

I frist tried to revive the old color ribbon with stamp ink (which
worked surprisingly well) and connected the printer via an USB-parallel
port adapter to my computer. Surprisingly, everythink worked
absolutely hassle free and a couple of minutes later i was printing
the CUPS printer test page. Shortly after i discovered that the
ribbons are still being made and sold (for the crazy low price of
~ 5 Euros, mind you) and after that... well, i use this printer
right up to this day and the sturdy way this thing is build i am
pretty convinced that even Junior may use it in the years to come.

If that (the 100 DM) wasn't a good investment i am not sure what
counts as one...