boyle@ANL-MCS.ARPA@uw-beaver (boyle@ANL-MCS.ARPA) (11/10/83)
From: boyle@ANL-MCS.ARPA Recently I posed the following question to people on the laser-lovers mailing list. An edited summary of the responses follows. ------------- [The question:] I have to decide between accepting a bid from Imagen and one from Symbolics. If anyone out there has experience to report, I'd really appreciate hearing it. Especially interesting would be answers to: (1) Did they deliver on time (and how long after the order was it)? (2) Any problems with the equipment or software? (We want to use the printer with Unix troff.) Thanks. -------------- [The replies:] >Date: 15 Oct 83 21:08:23 EDT (Sat) From: Mark Weiser <mark%umcp-cs@CSNet-Relay> We faced this problem 6 months ago, and picked imagen. No regrets: delivery was on-time, competent installer showed up, software tape included everything for troff use and came up rather instantly. Machine has had zero down time as we near 40,000 copies. Quality is off a little from when it first arrived, but supposedly there is a preventative maintenance thing we can do which will perk it up--we just haven't done it. ---------- >Date: 16 Oct 1983 16:13:14-PDT From: gerhart.Wang-Inst@rand-relay.arpa Here are my official answers to your questions; IMAGEN delivered a little ahead of time, less than 6 weeks I believe. We had a new local distributor who made a big effort for us. It was running within a few days; I produced my reusability paper the week after it arrived (with great trepidation I produced it, but it beat the diablo!) We have had no lengthy down-times, at most a few hours. But we have an operations manager who takes great pride in reliability; he considers 2 hours of Vax down-time (non-pm) in a year something to apologize about. The IMAGEN has a small paper tray and requires attention as well wrt the pre-mix it gulps every few thousand pages. Nobody has been specially trained and we have only an informal instruction sheet telling people what will happen to their lives if they do certain things and what they can do. No disasters yet. We've done nothing fancy with the IMAGEN but use both Scribe and troff. Quality goes up and down a little (sharpness, etc.) but doesn't vary nearly as much as with the Xerox printers we had at ISI (they were often down for weeks or totally unusable). When we were looking for a printer, in late spring, IMAGEN appeared to be our only choice. Symbolics didn't seem to exist for us and we weren't anxious to be the first on the block. We did have another choice since we use (surprise!) lots of Wang systems. But the Wang laser printer didn't seem to compare and we were really hurting for quality printing on the VAX. I got a testimonial from Brian Kernighan on IMAGENS and we (me and the operations manager) decided to go that route. So, the IMAGEN seems quite good in quality and service in our experience but that's not compared to the SYMBOLICS. The IMAGEN definitely has been worth the money to us. Susan -------------------- >Date: Sun 16 Oct 83 19:37:55-PDT From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA> [We have a Symbolics laser printer.] The delivery was no problem. I think they quoted us something like the three months and took a bit less. The interface is much simpler than that of the Imagen, and we run Scribe, TeX, and Troff to it more or less simultaneously. Some people have complained that it is not possible to query the status of the printer from the host. That's true but it only has caused us minor inconvenience. The main disadvantage is that we don't have any sense that Symbolics is actively pushing the printer. There is some thought that they may have just put it out as a revenue generator while they were completing the 3600 (or whatever that machine is called). I don't know if they've set up a maintenance arrangement with anyone on it. We're pretty happy with it. We've had some hardware problems but I don't think that is an issue in the comparison since both manufacturers use the same print engine. If we were buying today, we might look more closely at the QMS product rather than either of the Canon based ones. I suspect that Imagen is much more actively pushing their product these days than is Symbolics. ------------------ >Date: 17 Oct 1983 11:41:43EPDT From: jff@ll-vlsi We just finished installing an Imagen system. We asked for bids from Imagen, Symbolics, and Quality Micro Systems (Mobile, AL). Delivery was practically immediate (unit shipped within a week ARO). It took an hour or so to figure out that I needed a null modem between the printer and the VAX serial port. Beware of :rofix if you modify troff. This little goody is an editor script which takes an assembly language file and turns all the data segments into text segments. When invoked on the width table data structure, it causes a protection fault if the width table is reloaded. The fix is to take the call to :rofix out of Maketroff. Anyway, once that problem was solved, troffing with the correct width tables was possible. You will find with the Imagen system that you can only use Computer Modern Roman, Bold, Italic, and Special with troff, even though the tape contains many other fonts. Most of the popular troff macro packages put cut marks which the ImPrint-10 complains about being off page. I took these out. The only other hitch was that S&S Electronics scratched the drum when they installed it (they came back and replaced it). On the whole, we are very satisfied. We have used troff and the Tektronix emulator and both work well. The spooling system is good. Good luck. Jonathan Freidin (jff@ll-vlsi) M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory ---------- >Date: 17 Oct 1983 1151-EST (Monday) From: Christopher A Kent <cak@arthur.ARPA> I'd say go with Imagen. We went with Symbolics; delivery was about 3 months late, and the software is quite immature. Support is almost non-existent. The Imagens that are on campus seem to be much better off, though I don't know about delivery. Cheers, chris [Editor's note: An earlier message by Chris Kent discussing QMS versus Imagen may also be of interest. The header of this message read: From: cak@Purdue, 2 Oct 83 15:34:32 EST Message-Id: <8310022034.AA26097@arthur.ARPA> Contact laser-lovers-request@Washington if you can't get the archives and you want to see this message.] ---------- >Date: Mon, 17 Oct 83 12:35:04 EST From: Bob Brown <rlb@arthur.ARPA> Subject: Re: Symbolics laser printers Our delivery for the Symbolics was stretched out about three months longer than we had expected - the university ordered two at once (the other going to the computing center). One came only a month late. As for the QMS - I have a simple troff driver working, as well as nroff, plotting, and line printer emulation. A fancier version of the troff driver that uses the vfonts will be available in a couple weeks - I'm back at the University right now and all that work is out at NASA. Another group in NASA sent out bids on the laser printers and they chose Symbolics - solely on price. Unless something has dramatically changed in the past six months, the Imagen software is still an order of magnitude (choose your favorite base) better than the Symbolics. So far as I can tell, troff output here in the department still isn't as nice as that from the Versatec. As for other things - TEX is running on the Symbolics now, and I heard just last week that it's running on the QMS, too. Bob Brown ---------- >Date: Mon, 17 Oct 83 12:09 PDT From: Bill Croft <croft%Safe@SU-Score> We're having really good luck with our Imagen. Another plus for them is that they are just releasing some firmware to allow the printer to connect directly to the ethernet speaking TCP. Symbolics is pretty far behind in the protocol area. ---------- >Date: 17 Oct 1983 11:40:57-PDT From: garret.ucsc@Rand-Relay Jim, I think I'd like to begin with a few words on why we chose the Symbolics. There were four respondents to our RFQ: Symbolics, Imagen, QMS, and Xerox. Xerox was immediately disqualified because they indicated that they could not support troff, one of our requirements. I really wanted the QMS, but they were promising 90 days before having the troff software and fonts, and my impression of the company at the time was that they really weren't quite sure what they were doing. Besides, they were the high bidder. This narrowed the field down to two: Symbolics and Imagen. Another of our requirements was full pixel-addressability in order to produce VLSI test masks and other graphics plots. There was no way the Imagen with its 256k memory could hold a complete bit image, and although the two companies' bids were practically the same the expense of additional memory for the Imagen made Symbolics the winner. It turned our that interfacing all of our Versatec-oriented software (caesar, gremlin) to the Symbolics was a snap. A purchase order for a Symbolics LGP-1 was issued on December 2, 1982 Our unit was delivered and installed during the first week of January, 1983. I think we enjoyed such fast delivery because a deal for several machines with a large Silicon Valley computer game manufacturer was cancelled. Installation had a few hitches. Upon initial setup the unit failed to produce a test pattern. When he returned the next day, the installer removed an overlooked restraining screw, and we were in business as far as the Canon mechanism. Communication over the parallel interface (DR11), however resulted in lost characters and LGP commands. On their next visit, the Symbolics crew brought along a new cable, CPU board, DR11, etc. We decided to try the serial interface first, and when serial communication resulted in the same pattern of errors the CPU cards were exchanged. Presto! It worked perfectly. We then switched back to the parallel interface and have been running with it ever since. (If you are not doing raster plots you can probably get by with just a serial interface.) I suppose I should have mentioned above that we are running 4.1bsd Unix on a Vax/750. Installation of the software had a few hitches. First, the "make" file didn't work because of references to the Symoblics "chaosnet". This error was finally acknowledged by Symbolics in a revision notice which I only recently received. The other major error had to do with the CAT-to-lgp filter not recognizing the page break character generated by the -me macro package. -ms macros worked OK. Finding and fixing this bug required a bit of detective work on my part; Symbolics chose to hire a graduate student to write their software who wasn't very available and wasn't very helpful. I really wanted to see Symbolics find and fix the problems for me but... There still exists a problem with the queue lock file being set and not removed by the daemon with the result of files piling up in the queue. I have made it possible for the users to remove the lock and restart the daemon by hand if necessary. One of these days I might get around to fixing it. Changing over to 4.1c provided a new surprise: the unibus i/o interface was changed requiring a re-written driver for the DR11. Here again Symbolics was not much help; I was told they would not do anything about the driver until 4.2 was released. So once again it was left up to the user to fix. It really annoys me when manufacturers have this attitude. As if the customer has nothing else to do. The Symbolics salesman told me once that he would rather be selling Lisp machines and that he was selling more Printers than he wanted. Now for a more positive note. On the whole, we have been quite satisfied with the LGP-1. We have run off approximately 35,000 copies without a single paper jam. The font for troff is quite pleasing although there are some kerning problems and something about the larger sizes that just don't look right. I think it looks better than the imagen, but I'm no expert in typography. A sans-serif family is also supplied but is hardly ever used. The print quality has degraded slightly since installation, but not too badly, especially since there has been no service since the expiration of our warranty in April. A maintenance contract runs around $300/month, a little too much for us, so we are on time and materials and crossed fingers. eqn, tbl, and troff all work as advertised. I even had TeX80 up for a while, but no one wanted to use it. As mentioned above, interfacing to our graphics packages was almost trivial. Although a Xerox engine would have been much nicer, I believe the Symbolics was the correct choice at the time. A nagging suspicion concerns Symbolics's commitment to their printer products. Our salesman originally mentinoned that there were more font families for troff which were going to be announced at SiGraph. Now the story is that there are no plans for Symbolics to produce new fonts. If you like, you can call me at 408 429 2370 or 408 429 2565. Garret Tollkuhn CIS Board UC Santa Cruz 95064