this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Going from game port to USB with "plug and play" was a huge deal man. Not having to manually assign IRQ to get your audio working too lol. That said, there is still one thing that was cursed in the old days and remains cursed now: printers. Fuck printers.
I'm convinced that in the late 90s/early 00s, the printer companies got together to form a cartel, and have purposefully neutered all consumer-grade printers from that point forward. They knew it wasn't profitable (unless they charge an arm and a leg for the ink, which of course they eventually did), so they decided to just not play the game at all.
Yes they did exactly that actually
Iirc from a YouTube video I watch long ago they trade mark all the ink printer technology and abused it for years until we made laser printers
Do you mean patents? Trademarking ink wouldn't do anything.
I bought a laser printer for my job in 1990. They've been around
Yeah but they cost like thousands of dollars back then. Upwards of five figures for professional grade printers I believe. They were out of reach for most consumers.
Agreed. Assigning IRQ ports was so annoying.
Yea and some fucking cards only had IRQ selection jumpers for irq 5 or 7. Had a situation where I had to swap cards depending on if I wanted to use my twain scanner or play games with sound.
I'm glad I was never in that bind. That sounds hellish.
I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.
For me, it was about learning the anatomy of the laser printer. I do remember a lot about IRQ and memory addressing, but I don't remember it being that much of the test.
I would argue that for the humble serial or parallel port printer, things just worked. Yes, the ribbon needed replacing sometimes, and the tractor feed could snag or jam. But that's all a see-it-and-fix-it situation - zero tools required. These things took raw serial data, a straight dump of ASCII characters on the wire. Nothing to confuse and nothing to get wrong. No wacky software drivers either - just tell the software what hardware port to talk to and you're printing. You got boring text, tabs, spaces, newlines, and zero frills.
For whatever reason, the moment we started to emulate professional printing on a consumer budget was when things started to get hairy.
And you got to remove the perforated strips on the side of the paper after printing!
Printing nowadays is so boring.
If you think printing nowadays is boring, you don't have a printer
Nah, most of that was resolved decades ago too. The problem is greedy companies making printers who just seem to forget what printers are for
They're for throwing ink expired warnings and automatically ordering you new ink on a subscription plan. Right?
Remember when you had to configure the IRQ with DIP switches?
Yes! Remember when you had to set your HDD to master or slave using jumpers? Then channel select came along and made that easier.
Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.
Using a brother laser printer through cups on linux, it just works.
I'm pretty sure that Brother is the only printer company that didn't sign a contract with the devil.
Still only on the laser printers though. In my experience Brother inkjets have become trash like all the rest.
Ah, I've only owned one of their laser printers. It's like 13 years old and still works great. We've only had to replace the cartridge 2 times.
Used to be Lexmark was really good, too. Simple printers that weren’t too fancy, but they worked. Guess they’re still around, but I haven’t used one since the very early ‘00s.
And managing/freeing upper memory so you could play games in DOS like DOOM.