Transcript
A piece of paper on an old printer (a laserjet 4050 to be specific. It says: "Hello, My name is LaserJet 4050 and I was made in 1999. I’ve been doing my job printing your documents for many many years, however I think the motor that powers my paper feeder is bad. This makes me sad because I’m not able to do my job very reliably. As such, I am formally presenting this document as a letter of resignation. IT is working on finding a replacement for me, but for the time being, I apologize if I tell you I have a paper jam. Please allow me to refer you to my coworker, LaserJet 3390. 3390 resides outside of Ray’s office and can be reached at: Please accept my sincerest apologies for failing. Thank you for replacing my toner and restocking my paper tray. It’s been a wonderful 14 years of working together. Much love, LaserJet 4050
So you are telling me, that there was a time when peinters werent the hell-spawn that they are now?
Network laser printers that use standardized protocols like PCL5/6 have always been and still are pretty solid. They're just not cheap when it comes to initial costs.
Oh, no, they always sucked, but it was mostly a drivers/OS issue.
NT 4 and Win2k were about the peak of printer not-as-much-hell, but then Microsoft decided to move the driver into the kernel for Vista and later (maybe XP), and back to shit it went.
And then vendors tightened their belts and found every way possible to make printers even more cheaply, pushed hard on inkjets, and now it's all worse than it ever was.
To be fair, they had their mechanical complications, too. Some more, some less but most of them were always good for a nasty surprise in an unexpecing moment.
No, they were demons, they just did their job.