The Fujitsu DL 2400/3400 printer, the workhorse of 1989-1993. Nearly all of the customers of DBA had them, and it was only in the mid-90s that they started getting replaced with OKIs, which were a bit more durable and could print through 5-ply autocopy paper, which was a must because of the virman.
DBA had once imported a couple of dozen of these printers made for american market, with innards adjusted to 110V, and a handy adapter on the cable. The trouble is that at klaanca they already had two european ones, with just cables, as they were made for 220V. They actually needed a fourth printer from time to time and they'd borrow this 110V for another office, just unhooking the cable - the plug was the standard one for office equipment so it fit everywhere, they'd just unplug some desk calculator and pass the cable to the printer. So this printer was six times at the repair shop, because it was fried seven times. The discrepancy happened once in the shop, when they plugged it in for testing...
The final fix was when Carp cut off the plug and soldered the cable with the adapter straight into the innards.
There was also the 3850 model, which was a de facto printshop to itself, it could do 500 letters per second, and weighed almost ten kilos, of which we sold one or maybe two. One waited for ten days to be delivered, because we were asked from the dairy plant to print their yogurt statement... which had hundreds of thousands of lines, a hundred supermarkets had it delivered every morning, top tha with deliveries to factory mess halls and various eateries. We had big stacks of paper sitting around, guess we spent six boxes of paper, and what the specs say that it makes 49 decibels, that's a funny theory, in our closed space of our underground glasshouse it sounded much louder. These statements were... well, mostly unnecessary, who'll ever look into hundreds of thousands of lines, and what could one find there. This looked as if some chief accountant just checks whether he can take it as a fact that the data actually exist, as if he couldn't pull a statement onscreen as a text file on disk, and then look at it at will, even search by date or buyer. Same as the other idiot, v. february 1988..
I've been to the hats factory only twice before. Once back in 1971 when we were shooting the big documentary, I held the camera for this part, and I quite well remember the decrepit old building, motes of wet fiber everywhere, vapors, sheer neorealism. The other time was in 1980 where I went to check on my class doing their practice work, as their classmaster, in the new building now.
This was the first time I visited the tower. The new building was built as a square around the old one, and this tower was a narrow three storey building in the middle (I misremember, it wasn't square, but the tower is narrow and three storey). I don't remember who went with me, maybe Blaža, because we needed to carry that big printer to the third floor. While it is only ten kilos, its box is huge and unwieldy, the precise mechanics need good protection to survive transport. And we had to bring a couple of boxes of paper as well.
We put it on some kind of small desk in the middle of the top floor main room, and then it began cranking. They were due the payroll or whatever urgent print. The noise was as expected, we kept listening to it the whole week, but seeing that desk rock was something... The printhead shouldn't be heavy, 200 grams tops, but it ran left and right at such a speed that it really shook. I was under an impression that the whole tower was rocking as well.
19-V-2021 - 3-III-2026