...and it even works for Washington D.C.
Metro tickets!
here's something interesting I came
across: it's a business card
printer, although printer is in quotation
marks because it's really just a
business card dispenser made to look
like a printer
and it has an LCD clock built into it
and the packaging doesn't have any brand
name on it or anything
it just lists some of the features: press the
button, business cards come out
LCD clock calendar month and date, uses
two AA batteries
and one button cell for the LCD. There's
a photo of what it looks like; it doesn't
have any branding on the
printer itself on the box but if we open
it up
and take it out you can see it's
branded as IBM and it was a promotional
item for their IBM
Printer Selection Center. I looked that
up it's still in business today although
they use a different phone number now
they sell very large industrial and
commercial grade printers
and they even still make dot matrix
printers so I guess they would go around
trying to sell printers and
when they would want to give their
business card to a client
they would hit the button and it would
spit out a business card that they would
hand off
and I think this is from around 1997; that
certainly fits the styling and the beige
color
and I think this one is missing the
output tray because you can kind of see
it on the box here
where the business card would come out
of the back it would have a tray to hold
it
but this one didn't come with that. You
can see the holes where the tray would
attach
and that's the slot where the business
cards come out
and it runs on two AA batteries
and also the internal button cell
battery for the clock has gone
dead. I could open it up and try to
replace that but you can see what the
clock would look like it's just a
standard
very basic LCD clock. To demonstrate the
business card
printer in quote marks or inverted
commas if you're British
which i've never understood calling it
that because you can see
only the opening quote marks are
actually inverted commas
the closing quote marks are just
raised commas
but anyway we can put in some Dura-Leak
batteries
and now we're ready to open it up. It's
rather stiff
but there's where you load your business
cards and it has an adjustment for how
thick or thin they are
it looks like it's in the middle position
right now and you can see the rubber
rollers that
are powered once you push the button
to spit out a business card out of the
slot in the back
now, I don't have many business cards and
none for myself but
I'll use what I have including some
things are not
really business cards but are the same
kind of size
so that just closes like that and now we
can push the button
and start dispensing business cards
so it's kind of neat. I mean, if your job
is to sell
IBM printers and you want to give
somebody
your business card what better way to do
it than have what looks like an
IBM printer print out a business
card for them
yeah, sometimes it doesn't come out straight
because these cards are different
thicknesses
and some of them are glossy, some are a
matte finish, so
if you have all the same kind of
business cards like your own personal
business cards
it would work a lot better because you
would be able to adjust that thickness
setting to match your cards
and it even works for Washington D.C.
Metro tickets
I don't know if they still use this
design today but this is what I have
from probably
10 years ago still has some value left
in case I ever want to go back and
use it again
yeah, that one's kind of thick so it's
having trouble with that
so that's just a neat little piece of
IBM paraphernalia
from their Printer Selection Center
and it's just the right size to match
this FM radio
designed to look like a computer which I
did a video about a while back
so I think even today this would be
pretty neat to have on your desk
an FM radio made to look like a late '90s
desktop PC
with a matching IBM printer. "To hit the
right note on your Personal Computer
you've got to have the right personal
printer
that's why IBM offers an ensemble of
Personal Printers
for text, for color, for graphs,
for pictures, for speed,
for charts, for letter quality,
for whatever you compose, IBM Personal
Printers
for the finishing touch"