Printer drivers: still cruddy after all these years
Forty years ago, as a support engineer, I was called in to work out why a customer’s expensive new printer (an actual Centronics, as I recall) was printing so slowly. Eventually, I fired up the oscilloscope, and found that our hardware was putting a data strobe signal on the interface that was too narrow for this particular printer to reliably notice at the other end of a long cable. HQ was eight hours away in California, and a fix was needed NOW, so I disassembled the driver, found the constant that controlled the strobe width, and patched the binary to double it. Magic. Later, I filed a bug report (by Telex, of course), which sent my hacker cred in the engineering group soaring. My prize was that I was hauled over to HQ to work on a crash (sleep-on-the-floor-type) project. I suppose it was a good prize …
Biting the hand that feeds IT
