Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 5, 2021 12:51 UTC (Sat) by ejr (subscriber, #51652)
Parent article: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

And then there are the all-singing, all-dancing workgroup printers where you authenticate *at the printer* to ensure no one else picks up your documents... The level of complexity just keeps moving up.

Printers are a major reason why I left the sysadmin area. And I actually know what the PC in "PC Load Letter" stands for...

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 13, 2021 20:05 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

I didn't -- but it turns out to be in the Wikipedia article on this error (because of course there is one). It stands for "Paper Cassette", of course, because *obviously*. (What sort of historical artifact a "paper cassette" might be, I have no idea.)

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 13, 2021 21:12 UTC (Sun) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

I suspect it's the plastic casing that holds a huge amount of fanfold paper to run through - the equivalent today would be the tray holding individual sheets on a larger laser printer. Particularly with fanfold, you wouldn't want it to unfold until you were ready.

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 13, 2021 21:37 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I dunno ...

We always just put a box of paper underneath the printer. Okay, we didn't have the super-fast chain printers, but once I persuaded my boss to replace the dot-matrices with proper line printers, they could certainly fly through a box with ease ...

Cheers,
Wol

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:51 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Any printer that can hold more than about 50 sheets of paper still tends to use a removable tray to hold said paper -- that tray is the paper cassette. The Brother laser I have here holds about 250 sheets in its cassette, with the option of using high capacity cassettes that can hold an entire ream (500 pages) at a time.

(I also have several Canon and Kodak photo printers that also use removable paper cassettes...)