School Is Back In Session, Pick Up Some Brother Ink

By Adriana Noton

Personal computers have made students papers much more presentable than they were thirty years ago. The resulting term papers printed in Brother toner and Brother ink are so much better than anything that could be produced at that time using the old IBM typewriter.

During those days, grades were often more dependent on the student's ability to use a typewriter than on their knowledge of your subject. If a student were a poor typist and could not afford to hire someone to type his or her papers, term papers were often far from perfect. In the day of manual typewriters, each key stroke could produce a letter of a different darkness. If corrections needed to be made, one had to be careful that there were no smudges and that they did not rub a hole through the paper. Even though students might have a perfect grasp of a concept, messy term papers filled with spelling and grammatical errors could lower the grade significantly.

By the mid eighties, the personal computer was becoming affordable and word processing made it possible to prepare a paper that was able to show one's grasp of key concepts in a paper that offered correct spelling and grammar.

The problem became printing the paper in an acceptable form. The early nine pin printers did not produce a high enough quality print to match the requirements of many of college style manuals. Many professors simply refused to accept any papers that were produced on these inferior printers.

There were some attempts at daisy wheel printers. These printers were typewriters that could connect to a computer. The print that they produced was comparable to the typewriter as the print was produced in the same way. However, these printer were very slow and unable to keep up with the computers.

The inkjet printer brought marked improvement in the computer printing world. Even early inkjet printers offered "near letter quality" papers. The ink from the jet was able to flow together so that individual dots were less apparent than with pin printers and the inkjet was faster than the daisy wheel printers. After the color capabilities were introduced, these printers began to overtake the market. Not only could they produce documents in many fonts, they were able to make charts, graphs and print high quality photographs.

While laser jet printers are coming down in price, the ink jet printer is still the most popular in use today. It can effectively print a term paper that offers any number of fonts. In addition, it is able to print full color photographs as well as graphs, charts and other illustrations.

The capabilities of the personal computer were far beyond the college student's wildest dreams in the early 1970s. Yet today, many of those same persons are daily producing correspondence at their office and printing photographs at their home using brother ink and printers. The ability of the personal computer found in most homes is far beyond anything that they could have dreamed of back then. - 29854

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