Last week, IIT announced that all printers will be replaced by Gutenberg-style printing presses next year. The presses, similar to Gutenberg's original 1440 version, require students to set their own letters to print each page of their document. The process may be archaic and time-consuming, but recent printing press installations at schools across the country have yielded positive results.
Sara Stone, a student at Colorado College, loves their printing press system.
"The process may be cumbersome, but it's totally worth it," Stone said.
The decision to make the switch at St. Olaf was precipitated by numerous complaints from students about the StoPrint system of printer-copy machine combos.
"I'm so sick of going to every printer on campus only to find that it's temporarily offline, out of paper or just plain broken," Tegan Palmer '10 said. "Why can't we have a system that's reliable?"
IIT claims that the new printing presses will be reliable and promises that they will never have electronic or software issues.
"Since the machines run without electricity, software or any modern technology, we won't have the problems that accompanied StoPrint," an anonymous IIT representative said. "The trick will be to teach the students how to set their letters in order to create documents."
In celebration of the new system, an "Office Space" style destruction of all remaining StoPrint copy machines will take place on Ytterboe lawn immediately following the last final on May 25. Interested students are instructed to bring their lingering negative feelings, sledge hammers, steel-toed boots and anything else they would like to throw at a StoPrint printer.
"Editor's note: this article appeared in the April 30, 2010 satire issue of the Messenger."
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