Comment by billpg

I'm old enough to remember buying a mouse and having to install the driver that came with the mouse on a floppy disk. Once the mouse market agreed to a single interface standard (and again when USB mice appeared) the world got simpler. Any computer you could buy would just work with whatever mouse you happened to plug into it. You only needed a custom driver if your mouse had lots of extra buttons that no-one really needed.

I'm a little surprised that the same thing didn't happen to printers. I could imagine around 2005, Microsoft including a generic printer driver with Windows XP. This way, you could plug in any printer and it would just work, as long as the printer implemented that generic printing protocol, even if it were alongside their own printer interface.

Plug in printer. Windows detects device with generic printer interface. User prints document. Document comes out. User happy.

Oh sure, the printer would come with a CD that includes software that enables the "special features" of the printer. Digital cameras did this too. (Rule #1 of buying a digital camera: Throw away the CD that comes in the box. Break the CD just in case you're tempted that something on CD might fix some trivial issue you're having.)

At the same time, I'm not surprised that never happened. Those "special features", like shouting at you for buying the wrong ink, are just way too important to not have installed on people's computers.