1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked. Today it's a spyware, ink-selling nonsense.
1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked. Today it's a spyware, ink-selling nonsense.
Don't let that happen. Apply the (A)GPL and put an end to the bullshit.
LOL no.
Printing and scanning have ALWAYS been terrible. A fortune cookie somewhere: "GNU is a printer driver gone horribly wrong".
I have a theory that printer drivers are somehow produced by aliens, who are hellbent on destroying the Earth's infrastructure.
No driver needed. If a person wanted to, they could ftp a postscript file to the printer.
The machines took an anon connection. From there, simply using the put command resulted in pages coming out of the printer.
How a postscript, or encapsulated postscript file was up to the user.
Handwritten files to print fractals were fun too.
"Why is the printer taking so long?", lol
Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software development because he got triggered by proprietary drivers used by his laser printer
The change he wanted to make, that he'd made to the prior printer, was to shoot off a message to anyone with jobs in the print queue when the printer jammed because that was the quickest way to get it fixed.
I'm amazed xerox didn't think of this usecase themselves, unless they expected the printer to be attended all the time. In hindsight, it's good that they didn't.