apollo@ecf.UUCP (09/16/87)
I have a suggestion, which I believe to be original, for the workstation
and laser-printer manufacturers that could prove to be beneficial to all parties
involved them, the manufacturers, and us, the users. This suggestion is
based on the realization that there are alot of CPU cycles that
go unused during the day since printing is only done intermittently anyway.
While most sites use something like a 68000-based LaserWriter
it won't too long before 68020-based laser-printers are available in
fact the Varityper ( 600 dpi device) is so based and is already on the market.
Now load such a machine up to 8 or 16 Mb, put in a 68881, a Winchester drive
(40 Mb or greater), and some networking hardware and software and you have
a compute server that you can add into a network of workstations.
I ,and I'm sure others on the net, would like to see what sort of response
this suggestion generates. Someone out there could make quite a bit of money
implementing this idea.
Vince Pugliese
University of Toronto
(416)667 7744
e-mail:apollo@ecf.toronto.edu