Possibly one of the coolest
hardware hacks of all time. Some
talented engineer at
Apple (what was his name again?
Wobneck?
Wuzneat?)
spent some time trying to
come up with a way to make the
Apple Imagewriter more useful. A tall order, because the
Imagewriter is possibly one of the
crappiest
printers of all time; the one I used in
middle school had the nasty habit of
interjecting what were apparently
Cyrillic curses in the middle of a
Judy Blume book report... but I digress. Well,
that engineer realized that the only
thing that worked
well was the
motor that
shuttled the
print cartridge back and forth. So, he designed a better
cartridge for it to use.
This cartridge, $20 at your local Apple retailer, and the associated software would give a fairly nice-looking scan of any legal-sized document you fed into it. Of course, since it was scanning it in line by line, it took 10 minutes, but this was 1986, and for a $20 scanner, people were willing to wait.
And so you could be the envy of the neighborhood with your very own combo printer/scanner. Very cool. Very hackish. Very Woz.