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.
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.
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
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.
Do you mean patents? Trademarking ink wouldn’t do anything.
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.
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.
Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.
And managing/freeing upper memory so you could play games in DOS like DOOM.