
Memories of a printer - mwcampbell
http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9420-memories-of-a-printer
======
asveikau
Ever since I first set up a printer on Linux many years ago I thought Unix
printing was awesome. In those days, before this current era where every
mainstream print ui has some variant of "save PDF", it was a huge breath of
fresh air to have an interface so simple as "pipe postscript into lpr". Once
you got that part working you could pretty trivially set up samba to share it
with Windows machines and not have to worry about the hideous world of Windows
printer drivers. (For the rare occasion when I need to print I do that today
on my home network, with OpenBSD running lpd and samba talking to OS X and
Windows clients.)

Recently I read on HN that in the 70s, formatting documents with troff and
printing them provided the financial justification for Unix back then. I was
not surprised. Unix philosophy and printing mix well together, probably not by
accident.

~~~
digi_owl
On that note, supposedly the reason that RMS started FSF and GNU was printer
drivers.

Where the previous printer had come with source code for the drivers, allowing
RMS to implement an "out of paper" message directed to accounts with a
document in the queue, the new printer didn't.

And when the company that sold it proved unhelpful he got frustrated enough
that he ended up formulating what was to become the four freedoms.

------
smacktoward
The original HP LaserJets were absolute tanks. (And priced like tanks, but
still.)

Like the author I'm looking at buying a new HP multifunction printer, but
since HP has long since joined the stampede towards disposable junk I'm not as
optimistic about its future lifespan. At least their Linux support is
decent...

------
Animats
I still have a LaserJet 5L, nearing 20 years old. It's on a USB to parallel
converter. Those are still easily available for under $10. It's plugged into a
Windows 7 machine, and the Ubuntu machine has it configured as a network
printer, which works fine.

In practice, I just don't print much any more.

