[Liskni_si]

The thing is that writing a printer driver was quite close to being the simplest thing in the world back then. :-)

I remember that when a friend first introduced me to Linux around 2002 (we were both high school kids), I ended up writing a rudimentary printer driver as the printing support in Linux required installing 250MB worth of packages that I simply didn't have enough space for, as I had installed Linux to a 1GB partition that I got after squeezing the Win98 on my father's laptop into 3GB. I used Red Hat Linux—not the most minimal distro but I had no idea what I was doing. So when I wanted to print something and couldn't install the printing packages, I grabbed the paperback printer manual which described all the low-level commands the printer supported, studied it to find the commands I'd need and then wrote a simple program that took an image and sent it to the printer. It couldn't have been longer than a few hundred lines.

The printers back then were simple and came with real reference manuals that documented how to communicate with the printer, so you could really write a simple printing program/driver without being a UNIX legend (I am not).