| > Far from the utter complexity of modern things. Although it would, at times, go wrong there are very few things to this day that do impress me more than typing this (admire my "useless use of cat" btw): ... $ cat tiger.ps | netcat 192.168.0.78 9100
And see my HP LaserJet 4M+ (speaking PostScript natively) start printing.Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do have a SOHO and a modern printer/scanner at home and it can do more stuff. But the elegance of netcat'ing a PostScript file to a printer and seeing it print without needing any driver nor any configuration whatsoever [1] was quite something. It was simpler indeed and it was elegant and it did feel like magic. Now it wasn't fun if you printed many pages and suddenly it started printing garbage but still... [1] you had to configure the printer itself to get an IP, but that was done on the printer itself |