A Conflagration of Randomness

One of my friends’ AIM statuses today was “PC Load Letter… What the f*** does that mean?!” She’s a CS Major and I didn’t know what this meant so I assumed she was having an issue with her computer. So I googled it and found out that this message is actually what old HP Laserjets used to say when it needed more paper.

This message is confusing (I had no clue what it meant) and confused a lot of people:

The non-intuitive message confuses people for several reasons. The abbreviation “PC” is misleading because it is widely understood — especially in the context of electronic office equipment — to mean “personal computer“, suggesting to many that the problem lies in the computer, not the printer. The word “LOAD” is also ambiguous, as it can also refer to the transfer of electronic data between disk and memory. Furthermore, the word “LETTER” is only associated with paper size in the US and Canada as A4 is the standard size used in the rest of the world. Thus, users encountering this message may believe that they are being instructed to transfer the data or content of their letter to the printer, even though they have already sent the job to the printer.

The particular quote my friend had was from the movie Office Space when a printer in the film displayed this and the main character exclaimed the above quote.

Linked the the PC Load Letter on Wikipedia was an article with the title “lp0 on fire.”  Relating to a printer article this really caught my eye since I knew that lp0 was short for laserjet printer on port 0.  I read this article and this is what it said:

The origin of the “on fire” message was in the 1970s when line printers were large mechanical affairs with a high speed drum rotating at 1200 to 2400 RPM and impact printing heads. Misaligned operating components could cause the paper to come into direct contact with the high speed rotating parts, generating quite a bit of paper dust and increasing the likelihood of a paper jam. If a jam was not detected soon enough, the accumulated paper dust, ink dust and paper could generate enough friction along the rotating drum to start a fire. Furthermore, the cleaning solutions used in the printers were usually alcohol based, the fumes of which also presented a fire hazard. However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires.

I think it would be really scary if my printer caught on fire, but thankfully these were the old printers.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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