A Brief History of Printing with Microsoft Windows
If you are running Microsoft Windows today, you can more or less print to any available printer, from a $100 bargain-basement inkjet to a $1,000 Tektronix color printer. This versatility is possible only because of software standardization.
When Microsoft DOS was the standard PC desktop operating system, every application had to supply its own printing software or printer drivers. If you bought a piece of software from Company X, you had to hope that it supported your printer. Thus, often you had to check which printers your new software supported and buy one of those. Either that, or wait until Company X supported your printer, which, more often than not, never happened.
Companies tended to produce printer drivers for only a select few of the popular printers on the market, such as the HP LaserJet. Even worse, you might have a printer driver for your laser printer when using a drawing package, but if you wanted to use a word processor from a different company, it would not be surprising to find that your printer was not supported!
11.1.1 Hewlett-Packard Chooses Standards
During this time, companies like Hewlett-Packard were driving the printer business and introducing standards that could only make things better. At this point HP had been in the printer business a long time and had introduced many different types of printers and plotters. It had already introduced a standard language (Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language, or HPGL) for drawing graphics on a plotter, which allowed the user to issue draw commands like, "Draw a line from point A to point B."
Hewlett-Packard introduced the LaserJet series of laser printers, which became extremely successful because of their high quality and low cost. These printers were driven by a language called PCL (Printer Control Language). (Even today, printers manufactured by HP and several other companies support PCL.) Even if you don't have the exact printer driver you need, if your printer supports PCL you can at least get some output from it.
Moreover, Hewlett-Packard used PCL with all its printers, so if you wrote an application to communicate with the HP LaserJet Series II, you could be pretty certain that the code would work with later printers in the range. Although HP is not the only printer manufacturer, it can certainly be credited with jump-starting the market.
While companies like Hewlett-Packard were making printing easier, the software problems still existed. If you did not have an appropriate printer driver for your application, you would not get anything out of your printer.
With the release of Microsoft Windows in its various forms, the printing crisis was more or less over. Windows provided a standard graphical user interface, or GUI, and anything that you could draw on-screen could be printed out. Microsoft provided Windows drivers for the most common printers. Over time, as new versions of Windows came out, more and more printers were supported. Now all that the programmers had to do was write code for Windows, and they could use that same code to talk to any printer that Windows supported.