alt Hacker NewsIf this could all finally solve, once and for all, printing and scanning issues it'd be lovely (btw there are entire businesses who's only raison d'etre is "installing printers at clients and fixing them when they stop printing").
But of course it's hard not to both marvel and lament (at) the fact that in the mid-1990s (so yup 30 years ago) I could:
nc 192.168.1.150 9100 < tiger.ps
I know, I know, about garbled print jobs, pages of codes being printed, etc.
But still: it's hard to not at least wonder if some things haven't been lost. For a start printers with their own IP addresses were sweet (instead of a USB cable and, now, people setting up, say, a Pi just to expose a LAN IP for/to their printer). Then of course another talk could be had about the "quality" of modern day HP laser printers compared to what you'd get int the nineties.
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That mid-1990s postscript, networked printer when new cost as much as a small car! The HP Laser 1000 was like $250 tops new.
I've always thought USB-only made no sense on a printer. If there was one device in your house that multiple computers (and phones, don't forget) would want to use simultaneously, it's a printer. I'll only buy a printer that has its own built in network connectivity. Infuriating to have to stick a Pi onto your printer just so it can do what should be basic, table-stakes functionality.
I was digging into the history of PostScript engines inside laser printers and Adobe made tons of royalty money off of that for quite a long time.