The Ware for January 2018 is a front panel VFD/switch controller board for an HP Laserjet 4+. Archels nailed it — I checked u19pb1996 in Google for hits and nothing came up, but maybe I was too hasty and typo’d the number when cross-checking the image. Anyways, this post is now the top hit for that part number :) Congrats, email me for your prize.

+1 to zebonaut’s comment about the firmware code from the early 90’s never needing an update, ever…they just don’t write software like they used to anymore! It’s funny to see the panic in the eyes of a modern software developer when you tell them a subsystem has no firmware update path, ever, and their code just has to work reliably from day one. And then you tell a hardware developer the same thing and they go “yah, so?”…there’s no such thing as a downloadable hardware update, of course the product ships complete, working & tested. And not only does the hardware have to work, it carries a warranty, unlike most software…

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