Comment by Spooky23
11 hours ago
The magic were the old minicomputers.
My wife ran a billing system that was a Motorola based AS/400. It was purchased in 1989/90. An ibm CE would drop by and swap parts every now and again when the computer phoned home.
They retired it in 2013, when a key part for the printer was no longer available.
There used to be a number of vendors selling boxes to connect mass market printers to IBM mid-range and mainframe systems. Axis was the one I worked with but there were many others.
I think they had all moved on or disappeared by 2013 though.