I worked on an OS called CTOS back in the day. It was difficult to set up printing, because there was no feedback.
It worked or it didn't, and there were queues to configure and services to install and network connections...
Somebody in a trade rag wrote "Its easy to print on an Apple, difficult on an IBM PC and impossible on CTOS". That smarted.
So a guy named Tom Ball (later the Java Swing guy) wrote a
Prolog script that somehow could just tell you if printing was working or not, and what to do about it. Never figured out how he did that. BUt our trouble tickets went from something like 60% printer-related, to noise. Just like that.
I remember after all these years, and try to make software foolproof. For the customer service folk, because they matter.
I worked on an OS called CTOS back in the day. It was difficult to set up printing, because there was no feedback. It worked or it didn't, and there were queues to configure and services to install and network connections...
Somebody in a trade rag wrote "Its easy to print on an Apple, difficult on an IBM PC and impossible on CTOS". That smarted.
So a guy named Tom Ball (later the Java Swing guy) wrote a Prolog script that somehow could just tell you if printing was working or not, and what to do about it. Never figured out how he did that. BUt our trouble tickets went from something like 60% printer-related, to noise. Just like that.
I remember after all these years, and try to make software foolproof. For the customer service folk, because they matter.