engst@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Adam C. Engst) (11/21/87)
I am in charge of some of the public terminal rooms at Cornell and am
looking for some help. We have a number of Macs (between 5 and 40 per room)
and need some way of letting them print. Our current setup is with 512Ke's,
four Macs to one Imagewriter I. The problem is that the Imagewriters are
simply not designed for that kind of use and are continually breaking
(almost as often as the Macs, which also aren't really designed for battle
usage). We are upgrading to Mac Pluses and were thinking about going to
Imagewriters IIs as well, but the few of those we have have been an even
greater problem with the Imagewriter Is (something about a little magnet in
the cover which tends to fall out when knocked around). So, I'm looking for
another alternative. The LaserWriter is out because a few of the rooms are
unstaffed and the Laserwriters are too expensive to risk like that.
Commercial drivers for other printers are a possibility, but it would be
hard to make sure everyone who ever wanted to print would have the correct
driver. The Orange/Micro Grappler sounds good, if a bit expensive for the
number of Mac's we have, however, we may have no choice. The next question
is the printer. We need a fast decent quality printer that is extremely
durable (we like the C. Itoh line printers currently hooked to the
mainframes, but have no idea how to interface them to remote Macs easily).
Does anyone have any suggestions as to which printer would be suited to
our needs? Has anyone dealt with such a setup before, and if so, how was it
done? Please send me all responses, and if there are more than one I'll
summarize to the net.
Thanks,
Adam Engst
Cornell University
engst@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu
pv9y@cornella.bitnet