djlinse@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Dennis Linse) (05/27/91)
In a discussion about the amount of time it takes to print out Mahoney's IB Tutorial... In article <1538@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> mldemsey@cs.arizona.edu (Matthew L. Demsey) writes (with excerpts from others): >> ->| 4 hours to print using SendPS from a Mac II to a LaserWriter IINT. >> -> On a NeXT (with an attached NeXT laser printer) in under 30 minutes. >> much less than 30 minutes (it seemed more like 10 minutes) >> from a '040 cube with 32 MB > I would like to cite this as yet another reason why I left Macintosh for >NeXTs. An eightfold printing time is simply ridiculous. > >Loki While there are many reasons to switch machines and reasonable comparisons, this one doesn't seem quite fair. You're comparing the printing times of 1) A 68000 based machine with 2(?) Meg of memory running a version of PostScript at least 4 years old. (Remember, the postscript engine is in the printer, not on the Mac II.) 2) (My assumption about the first NeXT example) A 68030 with 8 (or more) Meg of memory running a 2+ year old version of PostScript. 3) A 68040 with 32 Meg of memory running the (almost) latest and greatest version of (Display) PostScript. It seems to me that 'only' an 8 (or ~24) times speedup might be considered small for a processor update (or three), a memory expansion, and a language update and optimization. I assume the lowest time is probably about the print engine speed, so the postscript part may be faster than indicated. While I'd definitely want to print it out in 10 minutes rather than 4 hours, there are 'simple' reasons that cannot just be ignored because one wants excuses why machine A is better than machine B. Dennis (djlinse@phoenix.princeton.edu) (Oh, and what about the effect of the Appletalk network vs. the NeXT direct printer connection.) A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire