Irwin Manoim
A printer is a machine which artfully lines up a bunch of microscopic dots on paper to produce elegant love letters, invoices, poems, bar charts and school projects.
Most of these sheets of paper go straight from the print tray to the waste bin, while the author experiments with changing the margins or the typefaces or the spelling.
The main convenience of the office printer is that it has made it so much easier to waste paper. In the old days of typewriters, you could be damn sure that the boss’s secretary would get it right first time, because second time round cost too much sweated labour.
When the office printer first arrived, the boss discovered that he could keep changing his mind, and it would take his secretary only a minute to print out another draft.
Then printers got fancier and fancier, and offered typeset-quality fonts (now there’s a word no secretary had even heard of 10 years ago) and the wastage levels shot up even higher as each letter was fiddled into a new format or a new shade of a new colour.
So what’s new in printers this year? You can waste even more paper more quickly, more simply and reliably, more cheaply, in a greater variety of colours.
The credit for all these advances in printing and these setbacks to the world’s forests goes in large part to a company that has never built a printer, Microsoft. For it is largely due to Windows that the process of printing has got easier, and the results more sophisticated.
In the old DOS days, it was cause for considerable astonishment if you actually got your printer on speaking terms with your computer first time round.
First, you needed to dig deep within the printer to discover tiny “dip switches” which had to be toggled into different positions at considerable cost to your fingernails.
Then each separate application on your hard disk had to be “configured” for the new printer. Then you tried, and tried again, as margins and page breaks kept wandering off into places they should never have been …
Windows has made installation all but painless. A single click on a setup programme puts the appropriate software in the right places for you, and all you need to endure are several screenfuls of PR-speak from the printer manufacturer.
If the printer works with one application, it’s almost certain to work with the others. The printer is no longer equipped with batteries of warning lights; if it needs more paper or ink, Windows will tell you, in plain English.
With Windows 95, this went a step further. New generation of “plug-‘n- play” printers will require no software fiddling at all. Modern printers need only to be plugged into the printer port on the back of the computer. When Windows 95 starts up, it recognises the printer automatically, chooses the appropriate printer drivers itself, and prompts you to install them.
Windows 98 goes a step further: by simply plugging the printer into the universal service bus (USB), the operating system recognises the hardware and automatically installs the drivers to run it.
Did I say “plug in”? There’s an even newer generation of printers which don’t even have to be plugged in. These use an infra-red “eye” which allows users of infra-red notebook computers to simply park their computers on the same desk as the printer, press a button … and print.
But, to return to the bad old days. Old- style printers arrived with a couple of awful “built-in” typestyles or “fonts”, available in only one or two sizes. They were known as “monospaced fonts”, because they blindly allocated the same space to both a skinny letter “I” and a fat letter “M”.
Windows liberated users by allowing them to amass vast collections of “TrueType fonts” which were sophisticated “proportional” typestyles (the skinny “I” gets only the space it deserves).
Better still, TrueType fonts could be enlarged to enormous sizes without looking raggedy, then faithfully reproduced on a printer – any printer. Suddenly, what the eye saw on screen became what the printer produced on paper … well, more or less. Even ancient dot-matrix printers could be made half respectable by the magic of TrueType, and the only downside was that printing took a little longer.
Still, we cannot give all the credit to Microsoft, particularly since the Apple Macintosh was doing all this in 1984. Printing technology has also become more sophisticated, cutting down on smeared pages (new, quick- drying inks) and paper jams (paper paths through the printer are much straighter and simpler). Better still, prices keep falling; laser printers cost less than half what they cost four years ago, and colour is no longer an exotic luxury.
In fact, the colour inkjet has cornered the home consumer market. Inkjet technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, and is an affordable option for small home, small office users.