Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!laser-lovers From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers Subject: Re: relative speed of LaserWriter and Dover Message-ID: <915@uw-beaver> Date: Thu, 14-Mar-85 16:49:36 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.915 Posted: Thu Mar 14 16:49:36 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 15-Mar-85 05:08:00 EST Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 34 From: Brian Reid The true speed of a Dover is not 60 pages per minute, as advertised. That is just the burst speed of a Dover. Stanford's Dover seems to be able to print. about 15 pages a minute, integrated over time. The Apple LaserWriter has a burst speed of 7 or 8 pages a minute. But the LaserWriter can really and truly be run at its burst speed, while the Dover cannot. Because of the structure of its software, the Dover sits idle, not printing, more than it prints. Dovers spent a lot of time in "Ethernet listen" mode, and a lot of time in "build bands" mode. Surely you have spent a lot of time impatiently standing next to a Dover watching the little display change from E to P0 to S to--finally--P, before your pages start printing. An Apple LaserWriter connected to a time-shared Vax can do all three of those in parallel--listen to the Ethernet, do necessary conversions (such as the Press to Postscript conversion necessary to emulate a Dover), and print pages. I therefore claim that the true speed ratio of a Dover to a Vax-peripheral LaserWriter is not 10:1 but 2:1. Also, a Dover would cost about $160,000 if it were for sale (the last one that I know about being actually sold intact changed hands for roughly that sum). For that price I could buy 22 Apple LaserWriters (paying full list price for them), which would print at 154 pages per minute collectively. They would also be a lot more reliable. As Chuck Hedrick of Rutgers likes to point out from time to time, a single large printer like the 9700, with a full time operator, is a very different beast from an equivalent number of smaller printers, collectively without operators. The LaserWriter is obviously not a substitute for a 9700, even though it is vastly cheaper per page per minute and has vastly better print quality. It is instead a delightful new alternative in the laser printer marketplace.