Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!seismo!harpo!eagle!mhuxl!ulysses!cbosgd!ucbvax!ucbcad!tektronix!uw-beaver!laser-lovers From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers Subject: More 9700 experience Message-ID: <780@uw-beaver> Date: Sun, 25-Dec-83 19:41:01 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.780 Posted: Sun Dec 25 19:41:01 1983 Date-Received: Sat, 31-Dec-83 00:35:10 EST Sender: root@uw-beave Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 122 From BEC.SHAPIN%USC-ECL@SRI-NIC Sun Dec 25 16:40:55 1983 I was interested in Rutger's experiences and would like to relate ours. GENERAL ======= We have three large IBM systems, 6 DEC 2060's, a Honeywell CP-6, many HP 3000's etc. A lot of printing is done at RJE sites and a lot at our central site. I started using a 9700 at a service bureau several years ago for some jobs that required legible reports. The owner told me that CE's varied greatly in ability, and that when his "regular" CE was not available, he was reluctant to let anyone else service his machine. He had very well trained operators and kept his machine as clean as possible. I do not have the figures but believe he had a high up time. He had figured out how to add special characters to the supplied fonts so he could do things like boxes and special forms with characters. At that time I tried to get information on 9700 metacodes from Xerox. The salesman did not know that such things existed, did not understand why I would want to know them and could get me no information. I finally found someone in the plant who told me that they indeed had given 4 hour classes in the past on the metacodes, and that I should send a request thru my salesman with the statement that we knew they were unsupported for customer use and would keep them confidential. We sent this but the request was denied because we did not have our own machine. In April 83 we installed a 9700 to replace one 3000 lpm printer. We still got a refusal on the metacodes. The first partial month the printer was in use we printed 1.1 million images (we run 3 shifts, 6+ days). Our usage had climbed to 2.7 million in October and we installed a second printer in November. Our machine is online to an IBM channel. The current 9700 operating system does not support on-line operation as well as it supports operation via a tape unit. The next 9700 system release is supposed to do better. The IBM JES operating system does not pass full EBCDIC characters to the printer, so doing special things may require direct allocation of the printer [operationally undesirable]. When we have many small print jobs in the JES spool queue the 9700 often stops printing while it waits for the channel to catch up. Once the job is in the 9700 disk queue, there is no control for controlling individual jobs. SERVICE LEVEL ======= ===== Besides the expected troubles of getting a new machine to run reliably, we have experienced frequent service problems. Even though our operators are not students, we find some are much better than others at keeping the machine running. Some months have been better than others. In Sept. we had a down time of 9.8 hours out of 636 hours available for a 98.5% service level [good]. In October, we had 48.4 hours of down time out of 704 hours of availability for a 93% service level [bad]. This included one period of 40+ hours of continuous downtime, which is not acceptable in a commercial shop and is partly the reason for the second system. The 9700 is a complex electromechanical system. The paper moves very fast to print 2 pages/second. It is easy for something to get out of adjustment and cause problems. We are near the factory so parts are available. We have an extended service contract with 24-hour, 7-day coverage. The CE's try to respond in less than 4 hours. The CE's are quite willing to schedule maintenance at our convenience around our peak loads. Xerox has a plan that will credit the customer for downtime in excess of 5% over a three-month period. We feel this average is unreasonable and would like to see less than 5% over a one-month period. SUPPLIES ======== Our purchasing department wanted us to use supplies from a third party because the prices were lower. We found the equipment settings were quite different for different brands of toner. The results were not as satisfactory as with Xerox supplies. The eveness of the copies and the contrast were poorer with the third party supplies. We use three-hole prepunched paper and print nearly everything duplex (both sides of the sheet). We finally convinced purchasing that we were getting better quality output and experiencing fewer problems with Xerox supplies. (One of our people who used to work at Xerox suggested that unpunched paper seemed to jam less. We don't have any experience on this point.) FONTS ===== I would like to use the 9700 for typesetting. I have looked at XICS and find it complex to use compared to SCRIBE (which we don't have) or Unix TROFF, TBL, etc. Dan Grim at the University of Delaware has written TeX post processors in C to use TeX fonts and drive the 9700. He runs TeX on a DEC-10 and his C programs on a VAX. I believe his programs are available to anyone who can use them. The Xerox fonts that come with the 9700 are not very good and not complete families. Only a few have 96 or 127 character fonts and as Hedrick says, Xerox appears to have never heard of accent grave. Xerox has licensed fonts such as Helvetica from Mergenthaler. These are distributed in encryted form. There are vendors who will make custom fonts for the 9700 such as Intran, (213)390-7873 who sells a PERQ based workstation for that purpose and Metagraphics (612)835-5422 who have a font center. GRAPHICS ======== Aside from the graphics support offered by the manufacturer, a vendor Image Research Corp. (805)687-6480 has developed software that will take calls that look like Calcomp plotter calls and produce line graphics on the 9700. They do this by using a special font that has points and short line segements at many different angles. The program composes the image from sequence of these font characters to give a surprisingly good result. This is then sent to the 9700 like any text file. -------