this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Funny: Home of the Haha

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Do you mean patents? Trademarking ink wouldn't do anything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I bought a laser printer for my job in 1990. They've been around

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] FlyingSquid 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Agreed. Assigning IRQ ports was so annoying.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FlyingSquid 4 points 9 months ago

I'm glad I was never in that bind. That sounds hellish.

[–] hactar42 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.

[–] boeman 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] dejected_warp_core 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] AnUnusualRelic 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And you got to remove the perforated strips on the side of the paper after printing!

Printing nowadays is so boring.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

If you think printing nowadays is boring, you don't have a printer

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Anticorp 1 points 9 months ago

They're for throwing ink expired warnings and automatically ordering you new ink on a subscription plan. Right?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Remember when you had to configure the IRQ with DIP switches?

[–] Anticorp 4 points 9 months ago

Yes! Remember when you had to set your HDD to master or slave using jumpers? Then channel select came along and made that easier.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Using a brother laser printer through cups on linux, it just works.

[–] Anticorp 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I'm pretty sure that Brother is the only printer company that didn't sign a contract with the devil.

[–] villainy 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Still only on the laser printers though. In my experience Brother inkjets have become trash like all the rest.

[–] Anticorp 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] RememberTheApollo_ 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.

[–] renrenPDX 4 points 9 months ago

And managing/freeing upper memory so you could play games in DOS like DOOM.