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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.

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.

Worked on printer firmware, can confirm.

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

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

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