Once upon a time, there was a simple, text-based operating system called DOS. Most people don’t realize, but DOS was the term was for the Apple 2 series of computers.

Then, along came the IBM PC and the “Microsoft DOS” (MS-DOS) disk operating sytem that many of us came to know and love.

One of the really neat features of MS-DOS was really part of its keyboard facilities — IBM had put a “Prnt Scrn” key on the keyboard, and MS-DOS knew what to do with that.

Just press Prnt Scrn, and you got a dump of the monitor screen’s contents to the printer. Oh, by the way, printers in those days were also text handlers. To print an “E,” the program sent the 8-bit value that meant E to the printer, and the built-in smarts on the printer knew how to print the E.

Continue reading Screen-Printing From Your Computer Screen