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thewayneWhat a long, strange road it's been. The intended cut-off date is 2027, but it may be moved further down the road past then, not a hard and fast date.
I hadn't heard about this, but there's a consortium of computer and printer makers called Mopria. From the article: "Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then.
Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: "This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on." It should be noted that Samsung sold its printer division to HP, and I think most people know my opinions on HP printers.
Standardized printer drivers are a wonderful thing. Back in the early '80s when PCs first came out, you literally WROTE your own printer drivers. For standard printing needs like spreadsheets or program code or stuff like that where you didn't need formatting, you just shot the output out to the printer. But if you wanted to do word processing niceties like bold or underline or things like that, you pulled out the manual that came with the printer, fired up a printer driver program that came with the word processor, and entered a whole bunch of finicky codes that told your word processor how to talk to the printer to do things like bold, underline, etc. Proportional printing wasn't much of a thing in the early days until laser printers and desktop publishing came along a little later in the '80s.
I kid you not. It was a royal pain in the butt. Get a code wrong with a typo, or plug the wrong value into the wrong part, and you got results that were, shall we say, interesting.
So when printers largely became plug and play, you have no idea how nice it was compared to 40 years ago!
I remember around '86 or so I programmed a dot matrix printer, a tractor-feed Okidata, to print 1099 tax forms. I had it doing micro-line feeds and going back and forth to fill in the boxes on that form. It was fed from a database that I wrote in dBase III. It was a lot of work to get it to do it right, and some tricky coding, I kid you not. And I heavily documented the code, including a giant disclaimer that you could not miss that said "WARNING: DO NOT TOUCH THIS CODE AS IT INCLUDES MICROSPACING FOR PROPER FORM ALIGNMENT. You'll break the alignment!" After I left the company for a better job (they wanted to turn me back into a word processing typist), my boss's husband, who was a "professional", touched the code and broke it.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/go_native_or_go_home/
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/09/11/1828213/microsoft-to-kill-off-third-party-printer-drivers-in-windows
I hadn't heard about this, but there's a consortium of computer and printer makers called Mopria. From the article: "Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then.
Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: "This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on." It should be noted that Samsung sold its printer division to HP, and I think most people know my opinions on HP printers.
Standardized printer drivers are a wonderful thing. Back in the early '80s when PCs first came out, you literally WROTE your own printer drivers. For standard printing needs like spreadsheets or program code or stuff like that where you didn't need formatting, you just shot the output out to the printer. But if you wanted to do word processing niceties like bold or underline or things like that, you pulled out the manual that came with the printer, fired up a printer driver program that came with the word processor, and entered a whole bunch of finicky codes that told your word processor how to talk to the printer to do things like bold, underline, etc. Proportional printing wasn't much of a thing in the early days until laser printers and desktop publishing came along a little later in the '80s.
I kid you not. It was a royal pain in the butt. Get a code wrong with a typo, or plug the wrong value into the wrong part, and you got results that were, shall we say, interesting.
So when printers largely became plug and play, you have no idea how nice it was compared to 40 years ago!
I remember around '86 or so I programmed a dot matrix printer, a tractor-feed Okidata, to print 1099 tax forms. I had it doing micro-line feeds and going back and forth to fill in the boxes on that form. It was fed from a database that I wrote in dBase III. It was a lot of work to get it to do it right, and some tricky coding, I kid you not. And I heavily documented the code, including a giant disclaimer that you could not miss that said "WARNING: DO NOT TOUCH THIS CODE AS IT INCLUDES MICROSPACING FOR PROPER FORM ALIGNMENT. You'll break the alignment!" After I left the company for a better job (they wanted to turn me back into a word processing typist), my boss's husband, who was a "professional", touched the code and broke it.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/go_native_or_go_home/
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/09/11/1828213/microsoft-to-kill-off-third-party-printer-drivers-in-windows
