Time was when your reporter and half the techies in London could have recited the Epson control codes off by heart. The company's dot-matrix printers, starting with MX-80, appeared in the early eighties when everyone started using word processors and Epsons quickly became best-sellers, to the extent that their control codes became a de facto standard.

In those pre-Windows days each application using a printer needed its own drivers, so a standard was desperately needed. In practice every printer sold seemed to require its little tweaks. And many of the arty writers who began using them affected to despise technology.

The result was that I, and anyone else capable of reading a hex dump, could have had a thriving business simply troubleshooting printers. I lost count of the number of friends of friends of friends who rang me begging for help. Or of the ones who snootily told me, a professional writer for some years: "I'm a writer. I don't understand these things."

What baffled me (still does, come to that) is how the Japanese, who seem so design conscious, could produce such bad manuals. I wondered if it stemmed from the way they wrote: that their graphical conventions were different from ours.

The Epson manuals were evidently written by engineers for engineers, and then badly translated. I actually wrote to the company and offered to rewrite them, but I never got a reply.

Those old dot-matrixes were great workhorses, though. I never had one give up on me even after printing thousands of pages.

These reminiscences were prompted by the fact that Epson has announced a rather artificial birthday. It is 40 years since the Shinshu Seiki miniprinter, the EP-101, was launched by its parent company Seiko.

Epson was not launched as a separate company until 1975 and was named after the printer (son of EP). Epson is offering a €5000 holiday as first prize in a competition to come up with an image for its 40th birthday card. Perhaps a sign saying: "The world's only 40-year-old 33-year-old"?