11.1. A Brief History of Printing with Microsoft Windows
If you are running Microsoft Windows today, you can more or less print to any available printer, from a $100 bargain-basement inkjet to a $1,000 Tektronix color printer. This versatility is possible only because of software standardization.
When Microsoft DOS was the standard PC desktop operating system, every application had to supply its own printing software or printer drivers. If you bought a piece of software from Company X, you had to hope that it supported your printer. Thus, often you had to check which printers your new software supported and buy one of those. Either that, or wait until Company X supported your printer, which, more often than not, never happened.
Companies tended ...
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