Just look what happened to RMS when they refused to share the source code to his faulty printer. He’s been on a warpath ever since

Hi, I worked on printer firmware. It was fun! Printers are robots, when you get right down to it.

Now, when they downsized and reorganized and put me on the windows driver team, I left the company within a week.

Maybe the folks that try to use printers are more frustrated that the ones that designed their software.

My worst technology experience of all time was maintaining support for a Zebra label printer in VB6. I can assure you that the users of these printers had maybe 1% the cortisol response I did when something went wrong.

Designing software for a printer means being a very aggressive user of a printer. There's no way to unit test this stuff. You just have to print the damn thing and then inspect the physical artifact.

Worked on printer firmware, can confirm.

"If it looks good, it is good." was a mantra

A million years ago I worked on some code which needed to interface with a DICOM radiology printer (the kind that prints on transparency film). Each time I had to test it I felt like I was burning money.

Definitely... http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pd...

no, because a broken printer is just a broken a printer. a broken fs is somebody else's important data potentially lost forever.

perhaps the suffering of the printer devs is karmically 'paid back' by the physical suffering of printers around the globe, thus keeping everything in balance.