The nightmarish problem of installing a printer

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Steven Friedrich <FreeBSD at insightbb.com> wrote:

> > "Common Unix Printing System" certainly sounds as if the intent
> > was to be the "ONE thing that is used for printing".  Whether
> > they did a good job of it is another question entirely :(
>
> I think that you don't fully apreciate the task at hand.  When
> Unix was first invented, there were no laser printers, ink jets,
> USB, etc.
>
> That no one can create a one-size fits all solution OWES to the
> fact it's simply not always possible to unify disparate designs.
> They weren't designed to be interoperable.  Technology keeps
> marchng forward. We need to discard all of it eventually.

Back in the CP/M and early MS-DOS days, similar doubts were raised
regarding display systems.

Fortunately, those doubts did not stop some developers from doing
what others thought impossible.  The results included X11, which
has been rather durable for a considerable time.