Who thinks about printing any longer? Not me.
Getting a printer to work with your computer is pretty easy these days. It works like this:
- You discover the printer of your dreams. It does everything you want, so you buy it.
- You get home and hook up the printer to the computer.
- You return to the store to get the USB cable that doesn’t come with the printer.
- You go back home, connect the printer to the computer.
- Acknowledge that Windows found the printer and has installed everything.
- Go back to the store to buy paper.
- Return home and start printing.
Things weren’t so easy back in the old days. The only things common with today’s world is that A) printers still don’t come with a printer cable and B) they don’t come with paper, either. The setup part, however, is vastly more easy today than it was back in the primitive PC times.
Before I begin my rant, I have no idea why printers don’t come with cables. They never did, even before printers used USB cables. You would think that the printer cable was a standard thing so the manufacturers would just drop one in the box. “Here you go,” they would say in a cheerful voice. But, no. Printers have never come with cables. It’s a stupid tradition.
Now to the rant, which isn’t really a rant, but more of a historical issue with printer installation.
In the pre-USB days, connecting the printer to the PC didn’t do squat. You still had to inform the operating system that a printer was attached. That meant scanning a list of hundreds of printers to install the proper printer driver. All too often, your specific printer wasn’t listed. So you’d have to guess.
Is the HP Color LaserJet 6001Na the same thing as the HP Color LaserJet 6001N?
As part of installing the driver, you had to pick which port the printer cable was attached to. Most printers attached to the parallel port, but they could also use the serial port or even a SCSI port. If you had multiple printer or serial ports, you had to pick the right one. And don’t get me started on the ordeal of configuring SCSI devices.
Now, compared with all that, getting a new printer today and getting it connected and working is a snap. In fact, my printers are all connected to the network. Windows 7 (and 8 and 10) automatically detect the network printer and set up everything for me. Consider yourself fortunate things work so well.
Yes, but it was character building, it’s just no fun these days plug in the USB up pops the ‘You Have Connected XXX, looking for driver’ box and its done. I really do not know how non techie people contended with the things. I remember a friend of my Mums having a Canon printer that only printed B&W not colour, had a fiddle found the driver was wrong and bang colour!
Comment by glennp — July 2, 2015 @ 8:03 am
That’s why I sold millions of books.
Comment by admin — July 2, 2015 @ 8:04 am
USB cable?? I thought everyone had wireless printers now. In fact when I look at the list of wireless connections on my computer I see a bunch of my neighbor’s printers. I’ll bet I could print out messages to them.
btw, can you tell me the syntax for quoting other peoples posts?
Comment by BradC — July 2, 2015 @ 6:07 pm
I still use a cable, but it’s an Ethernet cable on my printer. Not everyone is as sophisticated as you or I!
To quote, you use the HTML <blockquote> tag. And then </blockquote> to turn it off.
Comment by admin — July 2, 2015 @ 6:51 pm