Last night, I tried to set up an older printer to a new laptop, but I kept running into driver issues. I’ve always dealt with that, but never understood what it was and why it was necessary.
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An apt comparison would be to vehicle drivers. Just because a human driver can drive a car doesn’t mean that the same driver can drive a tank or an 18-wheeler or an airplane or a tractor. So the operator (the OS) can instruct the driver to make a series of deliveries (prints) but it’s up to the driver to operate the vehicle (printer) in the specific manner to accomplish this task.
Now you can extrapolate this example further being that different OS’s (Like Apple vs Windows) speak different languages and different versions of OS’s (Like Windows XP versus Windows 11) is like working for different companies – each company has it’s own rules and security procedures and specific lingo used.
So plugging an old printer into a new laptop is like trying to get 18 year old to drive somewhere he doesn’t know without using GPS. You need to use an older driver that can still navigate using physical maps. But the older driver doesn’t know what the 18 year dispatcher is saying. So you need to get the dispatcher to use a compatibility mode so that he can make the instructions clear to the older driver. Sometimes this works and in some cases it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then you’ve got to get an update for the older driver.
You can also try a generic driver, if available, but then you lose out on your more advanced features like printing in color or on different paper sizes. So that’s like trying to get a normal truck driver to operate a dump truck – they might be able to maneuver the truck but they won’t know how to use the dumper part.
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