What sort of dial-up modems does one use with a "Bionic Desk Lamp" iMac?

Question

Yes, I still use dial-up (and indeed, my aging Performa 5215 is still on its factory 14.4 modem).
I'm planning on buying a used G4 iMac on eBay (see my posting in the OS 9 forum for related questions), but what sort of dial-up modem do I use, that will work in both OS 9 and OS X?

Answer 1

Outside of perhaps a handful of top-end machines, printing on special media, I've never seen inkjet output that looked any better than MicroDry output on comparable media. Moreover:
1. With the exception of hot-wax-jet systems, inkjet output is soggy, and takes time to become waterproof (assuming that ever happens without spraying varnish on the page); MicroDry output is as dry and waterproof as laser output.
2. Inkjet has the highest cost of consumables of any printing technology ever devised. If you use your printer like crazy, you rapidly empty the often-expensive cartridges. If you don't use it like crazy, the often-expensive cartridges clog and/or dry out. By contrast, laser toner and MicroDry ribbons have a once-opened shelf-life that is whole orders of magnitude greater than that of inkjet cartridges, and the only way to ruin them is to (laser) print so many blank pages you overflow the waste-toner receptacle, or (MicroDry) break the ribbon (and that can be fixed with about half an hour's work)
3. MicroDry is one of the few printing technologies that can print metallic colors and opaque white, and can also automatically varnish their output. The more advanced MicroDry models also have a dye sublimation mode (with optional varnish) that allows them to double as the cheapest-to-run dyesubs available.
The ALPS MicroDry printer line flopped in the marketplace for two reasons. First, they didn't offer PCL or PostScript, even as an option, and (especially in dyesub mode) host-based RIPping is a long, slow, memory-intensive process (that's been known to crash my long-suffering Performa 5215). Second, ALPS has absolutely no name recognition in the United States except among engineers and technicians. This meant that they were fighting an uphill battle just to get anybody to look at their products.
Moreover, the few attempts ALPS made at strategic alliances (to overcome the lack of name recognition) were with a company (Citizen) that isn't known for much beyond digital watches and (maybe) hand calculators, and a company (Epson) that had strong financial reasons to suppress MicroDry, color laser, and anything else that competed with inkjet.
On that last note, may I point out that when a color laser printer small enough, cheap enough, and quiet enough to be classified as an "inkjet-killer" finally hit the market last year, it came from Samsung, a company that had name recognition, but absolutely no inkjet assets whatsoever.