HP made some great printers in their laser printer line. Of course, back in the late 90s, their inkjet printers were lemons for a while there… I worked at a company where we sold about 4 or so a month, and I’ll be damned if at least two didn’t come back. But no, HP’s LaserJets have always been great.
My dad had a LaserJet 3, which would give you a hernia if you tried to lift it – it was about the size of a mid-sized copier. I have no idea how many pages you’re supposed to get out of the toner and drum on those things, but I’d imagine we put somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 pages through that thing without doing anything to it. He finally opted for something a little smaller, loaned it to a friend’s wife, who wound up getting divorced, and then the thing was lost in the bitter argument that (always does) ensued.
Later, at a flea market in Sacramento, I watched a guy carrying one of these behemoths out to his table… and drop it. He dropped it from about waist height, and one of the plastic paper guides went skidding across the ground. He picked it up, took it to the little test outlet thing they had, and god damn it still printed a test page. That’s how awesome these things were – when the nuclear holocaust hits, there will be two things left: cockroachs, and HP Laserjet 3s.
Our little printer isn’t quite so bulletproof, but it’s still been through a lot. It’s the Laserjet 6L which while still very old today, isn’t quite as much of a tank. It actually weighs a little less than the infamous HP DeskJet, and it doesn’t take up as much desk real estate either (on account of it stores the paper vertically instead of horizontally). I think I paid something like $15 for it at said flea market.
It served us well for many years, until it developed a white streak up the center of the prints – no matter what you did, it wouldn’t print anything up that white streak. I’d been meaning to buy a new cartridge for it (the drum is integrated to the cartridge on these models) but I never got around to it. One day while at work at a radio shop, a hobo came up wanting to know if I wanted to buy any computer stuff. I usually dismiss them if they seem in a hurry (hobos in a hurry means whatever they’ve got is probably stolen), but this guy seemed laid back. He didn’t really have shit, except for… what the luck… a toner cartridge for a 6L! He only wanted like $5 for it too, and it was a remanufactured cartridge but still in the black plastic, so I coughed up the money.
At some point, our pet rats decided to play basketball using their food, and our printer as the goal. The downside to this is that despite my best efforts at cleaning it, it would choke if you fed it more than one piece of paper at a time. We used it for a long time like this, feeding it single sheets at a time whenever we wanted something printed. I read on HP’s website that this is a common problem with these printers, and you can fix it with a simple kit that replaces a few components in the paper feed system… unfortunately they no longer sell said kit. 
When we moved out to Indiana, the printer sat on a shelf and gathered dust. I was able to use my mother in law’s printer, and I had more important things to put on my desk like gaming consoles. Finally, my her third Brother was broken down and I needed a printer so I dug this thing out. It refused to feed paper at all, so I tore into it. As if by magic, or perhaps the boredom of 3 years on a shelf gave it a new outlook on life, it now feeds paper correctly again! Huzzah!
Holy crap did I really just write an excited, 650 word essay on a printer? I need a life.