Network Printing from Windows 3.x/9x/NT
Partly out of curiosity and also to make use of my old ThinkPads in a more productive way, has anyone come across a generic printer driver to print from say WFW 3.11 or Windows 98/NT over TCP/IP?
My network printer is an Epson Stylus Photo TX810FW inkjet multifunction. Naturally the drivers for it are designed for XP and newer, so I wondered whether it's possible for a generic driver to exist to send standard commands to the printer, maybe based on Epson's ESC/P language or PostScript. In theory, similar to the VGA driver that came with Windows.
I wouldn't be expecting to print colour photographs or being able to use the scanner, but more just the ability to print text and basic graphics from Word, Excel, etc. like in the dot matrix era.
My network printer is an Epson Stylus Photo TX810FW inkjet multifunction. Naturally the drivers for it are designed for XP and newer, so I wondered whether it's possible for a generic driver to exist to send standard commands to the printer, maybe based on Epson's ESC/P language or PostScript. In theory, similar to the VGA driver that came with Windows.
I wouldn't be expecting to print colour photographs or being able to use the scanner, but more just the ability to print text and basic graphics from Word, Excel, etc. like in the dot matrix era.
Comments
There were postscript drivers for Windows 3.x, and drivers for earlier LaserJet/Deskjet printers are mostly generic PCL. For example, I have printed directly to my HP Deskjet using thing original laserjet drivers under Windows 1.x.
But a problem you will run in to is that a lot of "modern" printers these days are actually totally lobotomized, and depend completely on their printer driver.
I don't know what the latest ones are like, but historically HP printers that are equipped with Ethernet ports have enough smarts to accept generic PCL or Postscript.
Haven't seen anything specifically under the specs on Epson's website, but it wasn't a $30 USB printer so I thought I might have a chance. Considering it's also capable of printing without requiring a PC at all, it must have some 'brains' and not be totally dependent on a Windows driver.
Although I can ping to the printer's IP without an issue, going through WFW's printer settings it's expecting to either find a shared printer physically attached to another PC or connected via a print server. With this in mind, on my home server I installed the Epson drivers into a Win Server 2003 R2 Hyper-V VM that I already had running as a file server (unlike Server 2008/2012 etc, there's no issues with authentication to old Windows clients). Once shared, the ThinkPad running WFW had no trouble finding it via the VM, so now have the PostScript driver routing to it.
It's getting late in the evening, so will give it a test run another day.