laser-lovers@uw-beaver (10/11/85)
From: Christopher Schmidt <SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.arpa> We have five Imagen printers on various ethernets and can print on any printer from any host. In other words, it is the usual practice here! They tend to run at the full duty cycle of the print engines, too. (Our fastest at the moment goes 10 pages per minute, but I see no reason why our 12/300's on order won't run at the full 12 pages per minute.) When printing a 30 page document, for example, the 30th page is usually processed before the 5th page is printed. This is fast enough that we don't even consider the non-pipelined pagereversal option to have a significant effect on our printer throughput. --Christopher -------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (10/14/85)
From: Robert Morris <ram%umass-boston.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.arpa> If you start doing graphics, especially bit maps, you will find that even the ethernet printers may not run at full speed, although for bitmaps the communications time is so dominant that 9600 baud serial lines prove painful. For higher level graphics the complexity of the graphics determines the throughput, but imagen printers seem to be able to do pretty well for realistic documents (imagen's release 2.2, the first guaranteed to be able to print a page of arbitrary complexity, seems to be about 10% slower when you invoke this guarantee than when you don't). Using the automatic page reversal is, to my mind, somewhat dangerous in all environments except plain text using printer resident fonts. Since the printer must accumulate all the pages before printing any, it seems likely that you can fill printer memory with pending impress commands and get in trouble when you need it for complex pages. I have no experience of this, since we don't default to page reversal on, but expect the host software to send pages in last page first order. bob morris umass/boston and Interleaf, Inc.