Rehabilitating and using an ancient DesignJet 1055cm

[zbrozek]

So I foolishly decided to buy and tinker with a truly ancient DesignJet 1055cm. It's been something of an adventure, but I am able to use the printer for some basic tasks. In order to get it to work I had to:

• Buy and install a replacement ink tube system since the seals on the original had long since deteriorated.
• Buy and install a replacement carriage belt since the original had turned to dust.
• Get new ink.
• Buy a gazillion print heads and send most of them back to sellers until I found a set that worked.
• Buy and install more memory, mostly because it was cheap and I felt like it. Interestingly the printer reports more memory (128 MB + 128 MB) than the driver seems to know how to use (128 MB total?).
• Use a Linux machine to print through cups because none of the Windows drivers seem to work on modern versions of Windows. They crash.

Anyway, I tried to print an image. It was 'receiving' for a very long time, and then the printer erred saying that there was no more space on disk. This surprised me - why would the printer need disk space to print? Surely the host is good for something. Further, my understanding was that the EIO hard disk was there to provide postscript support, and wasn't actually working memory.

So, does anyone know how to print images on this thing? Or how to massage the Windows drivers to work on Windows 10? So far it seems to work OK printing architectural drawings, which is what I bought it to do, but I figured I'd have some fun with it.

As an aside, I pulled out the EIO disk and it said 5 GB on the label, but when plugged in to a computer reports as 3.25 GB. Further, there's no partition table and it seems like there's a single vxworks vxext filesystem. I haven't investigated trying to read its contents yet.

Yes, I know I'm dumb for bothering to mess with something so old. But I've been having a good time.

[D Hook]

Not dumb at all.  Those are great printers.  I used one right up to my retirement and it never gave me any problems.  Still works today.  Great for line drawings.

What driver are you using?  Did you download one from the HP website or are you using a generic one that Win10 loaded automatically?