Rick's b.log - entry 2026/01/16

From DIP Switches to DRM: How Printers Never Got Better

Not interesting-boring, like "watching paint dry", but solved-boring, like "saving a file" or "plugging in a USB mouse". We have had domestic printers for roughly forty years (those dot matrix printers that plugged into early 8-bit home computers).
In that time we've gone from beige boxes and wobbly CRTs that might manage eight colours if you asked nicely to pocket-sized supercomputers, cloud infrastructure, and AI-generated cat photos that look disturbingly real.

And yet, pressing "Print" at home still feels like summoning an unreliable spirit that doesn't like you.

This is not nostalgia talking. I know my blog has a heavy dose of nostalgia (and not just because things were better in the old days), but let's be real here...printers in the '80s were actually kind of terrible. But they were objectively terrible - they were terrible in a way that at least made sense.
Back then, printers didn't pretend to be friendly. They were loud slabs of hostility that communicated exclusively through blinking LEDs and dense manuals. Want to configure one? Fine. Flip it over, remove a small hatch, and you'll be faced with a bank of unlabelled DIP switches. What do they do? Something important. Possibly everything important. Flip the wrong combination and your printer might decide it speaks EBCDIC now, at which point all your output turns into what looks like a lost digital cry for help: " %%`?//%?>?"
Of course, these switches are documented in the reference manual, which in those days was a hefty book. Romance novels in airports have less pages, and sometimes less excitement. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out what those DIP switches actually do. Oh, you'll look in the index at the back? What index? No, it's probably something bizarre like section markings down the side of the page. And when you find the setup section and find the diagram of the DIP switches, you have to then look elsewhere to find out what those things actually mean. It's like a fighting fantasy game book, except the only troll here is the printer manufacturer and you don't get to roll a die and punch it for gold coins.
It would have been quicker to note the positions of each of the DIP switches, then flip them one by one (power cycling the printer each time so it re-reads the settings) and then a "does it work yet?" test print. Repeat until joy, or at least until you hate your life enough to give up trying.

Dot matrix printers proudly claimed resolutions that were, in retrospect, wildly optimistic. A "9-pin" print head was waved around as though it implied quality rather than simply fewer visible gaps between the dots. Then came 24 pins (which was actually two rows of 12 pins slightly offset) which was like celestial level sex - we went from really crappy looking pictures to crappy looking pictures - this was massive.
Continuous fanfold paper, that everybody used because trying to get sheets of A4 into a printer was a fool's errand, had to be lined up just so with the tractor sprockets carefully engaged, because the moment it went wrong the printer would attempt to eat the paper diagonally and never let go as the situation descended into catastrophe, then farce, then Lovecraftian horror.

Here's the thing though: they were dumb, but they were honest.

If something went wrong, you usually knew why. The cable was loose. The paper was jammed. You had angered the DIP switches. There was no mystery, only blame, mostly yours, for not instructing your computer to understand the subtle difference between £ and #, and a dozen other reasons that were all perfectly explained in the manual once you'd followed enough breadcrumbs and taken copious notes as you travelled the maze of twisty pages, all alike.

Fast forward forty years and printers are, somehow, so much worse.

Technologically, of course, they are chunky miracles. They speak USB, WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and probably Esperanto. Some even speak PostScript. There are no DIP switches any more, you log into an embedded server. Paper options (plain, coated glossy, etc) can automatically change depending on the size of the paper inserted. Modern printers contain more computing power than some of the machines they're attached to. And they can print photographs in colour, quietly, on plain paper, at a cost and quality and speed that would have seemed miraculous in 1985.

And yet the experience is an absolute omnishambles.

Modern printers no longer come with a cable and a manual. They come with a driver download the size of a small operating system. Installing it spawns background services, tray icons, update schedulers, cloud connectors, telemetry collectors, and at least one thing that insists on running at startup forever. Somehow, printing text now requires more software than landing a craft on another planet.
Every major operating system update is accompanied by the ritual phrase "known issues with printing". Microsoft, in particular, has an uncanny ability to break printing repeatedly, in new and exciting ways, as though it were a feature they keep accidentally rediscovering. A printer that worked yesterday may not work today, not because anything is physically wrong, but because the universe briefly decided it just didn't feel like it.
And god help you if you use some oddball retro operating system. Would you like printing with that? [fx: riotous laughter]

This means . . . something.

Then there's the ink.

Once upon a time, running out of ink meant you went to the shop and bought more ink (or a ribbon if your hair is as grey as mine). This was simple. The printer did not have opinions about it. You opened a little flap, you inserted the ink, cartridge, ribbon, whatever, closed the flap, and all was good.
Sometimes, if you weren't printing anything important, you could just leave the faded ribbon installed until both the ink and the ribbon itself faded to nothingness.

Today, your printer is a small enforcement node for a multinational consumables business. It will refuse to print black text because the cyan cartridge is low. It will sulk if you dare insert a "non-genuine" cartridge. Some models would prefer you to subscribe to ink, like it's a streaming service, and will complain if you cancel. And expect perfectly logical things like "there's a problem with the ink cartridge so you cannot use the scanner". What?
At this point, the printer isn't malfunctioning, it's negotiating. Your sanity is being held hostage, and that report that you need to present tomorrow is its bargaining chip. A sizeable chunk of the internal firmware, and the real reason for the necessary updates, is purely there to manage the cartridge permissions.

All of this is wrapped in marketing language that looks impressive until you think about it for more than ten seconds. A scanner boasts "48-bit colour", which sounds wonderful until you realise the final output is a mediocre sRGB JPEG with eight bits per channel, aggressively compressed and optimised for nothing in particular. Printers claim "1200 dpi" (and higher) by passing over the same line multiple times, a wheeze that is shown up clearly if you look carefully at your printer's head test page. It should perform a nozzle test by briefly running each in turn so you can see if any are clogged. And you will see that there will be about 48 nozzles in the space of maybe three quarters of an inch. I'll leave you to do the maths.

To be fair, and this is important, two things have genuinely improved.

Firstly, colour printing is now cheap, commonplace, and fast. And secondly we no longer have to deal with continuous fanfold paper, aligning sprockets, and praying it doesn't drift halfway through a twelve-page print job. We can just load up a tray with normal sheets of paper and as long as the printer is kept clean and dust free it'll suck them in as required. These are real advances, and we should acknowledge them.

But everything else? Reliability, transparency, dignity?

Gone.

Modern printers are no longer simple machines that fail in logical and understandable ways. They are complex systems that fail mysteriously, enforce business models, and hide behind layers of software abstraction. When something goes wrong, you are no longer sure whether the problem is the cable, the driver, the firmware, the operating system, the network, the DRM, the cloud service, or the phase of the Moon.

And the worst part is that none of this is necessary.

Printing is not a hard problem. It was solved decades ago. Printers don't remain awful because the technology is challenging, they remain awful because sucking is profitable. The money isn't in making a reliable, pleasant device. It's in consumables, lock-in, subscriptions, and planned frustration. Users blame themselves, not the manufacturer, and the industry depends upon that assumption continuing.

So here we are, forty years on, still pressing "Print", still pausing, still listening, still waiting to see whether today is the day the printer decides to cooperate. And, if it does, if it does so correctly or if it's the day that it'll decide to print an icon scaled to fill (not fit) an entire page. Oh, by the way, now that I've gone and done that, guess what, you're out of cyan. Feed me, feed me now.

You know...

After forty years of domestic printing, the most advanced feature we've gained is the ability to be disappointed in full colour.

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