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> 1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked.

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.

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There was a brief golden age where it wasn't so bad, banded on both sides by dark ages. Some time in the 90s. Trying to remember the last time you could get away with just printing in blue if the black ran out.

Or printers that would accept refilled cartridges, good times.

My favorite machines were the Tektronix / Xerox printers. Solid ink, amazing prints.

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

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