[zrobotics]

I'll just point out the existence of the movie "office space" in here as evidence that yes, people were frustrated with printers. That movie came out in 1999, and the most iconic scene is the printer being smashed. That resonated for very good reasons, printers (and drivers) were almost more obnoxious back then than they are now. Please lose the superior "adult in the room" tone.

[toast0]

I mean, they were made because the printer was asking the player character to load letter paper, and they couldn't figure that out.

Ok, I don't know what PC stands for, but load letter means you're out of paper, please fill me up. It's not a blinking clock on a VCR.

[dpryden]

"PC LOAD LETTER" was a very common message on the old HP LaserJet Series II printers. This cryptic message on the tiny LCD display was short for:

PC: "Paper Cassette" Load: "out of paper, please load more" Letter: "US Letter size (8.5"x11")"

In some offices you'd be equally likely to see similar codes like "PC LOAD A4" or "PC LOAD LEGAL".

The LaserJet Series II and III didn't have paper drawers, but rather paper cassettes, which you could load with a stack of paper (maybe a few hundred sheets? less than half a ream IIRC), and then swap in and out of the machine as a unit.

Some models (I think it might have been an add-on peripheral for the Series II?) had two cassette slots, so you could load two supplies of paper at the same time. Either you could load the same size twice, in which case it would perform like a backup: if you ran out of paper in the first cassette, it would switch to the second cassette automatically but start flashing a light to tell you that it was time to reload the first one. Or you could load two different sizes, and it would select the right cassette to draw from based on the size of the document being printed.

The Series II didn't have a way to measure the size of the paper, so each cassette was designed for only one paper size. There was an interface where the cassette plugged into the printer which indicated which size paper it contained.

Due to the design of the paper cassette, it was very hard to tell from the outside how much paper was left. There was a tiny window but it was nearly opaque. IIRC later versions of the cassette improved this.

So if you had a model with only one cassette (which was fairly common, I think) and you loaded a "US Letter" size cassette, and it ran out of paper, the printer would refuse to print anymore until you gave it more paper. In the meantime the tiny LCD screen would flash "PC LOAD LETTER".

The printer was a workhorse and I can testify that many offices in my area were using 1980s-era Series II printers daily in 1999, when I had a part-time IT job that among other things involved doing maintenance on said printers. Replacing the rubber paper pickup roller and clearing paper jams out of the fusing unit were probably the two most common trouble cases, IIRC.