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From: mckay@EE.PURDUE.EDU
Newsgroups: mod.computers.laser-printers
Subject: Laser printing for the masses...
Message-ID: <8607211559.AA18943@ee.purdue.edu>
Date: Mon, 21-Jul-86 11:59:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: ee.8607211559.AA18943
Posted: Mon Jul 21 11:59:13 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Jul-86 07:23:34 EDT
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Organization: The ARPA Internet
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Approved: laser-lovers@washington.arpa

The Electrical Engineering Department here at Purdue is considering the
possibility of installing a laser printer to handle line printing and high
quality output in one of our student terminal rooms.  I've been asked to do
a little research on the subject and have two questions for the readers of
"info-postscript" and "laser-lovers":

First the easy question:

	Hardware: What would you buy?  We are a BSD UNIX site with a mix of
VAXes, Gould PN9080's, ISI and SUN equipment acting as our compute base.  We
have had a great deal of favourable experience with Imagen's line of laser
printers and have started to work with Apple laserwriters.  I was given
roughly the following specifications:

	- 20 pages/min. or better output rate (actual pages coming out the
	marking engine)
	- 30,000 or more (I suspect more like 40,000) pages printed per month
	- Cost in the $50K range
	- low supply cost, low cost or self maintainance
	- terminal room "survivability"
	- any thoughts on the following devices:
		- Imagen's new LBP-20 based laser printer (there will be at
		least one of these on site)
		- Xerox 5700 or 8700 (4.3 comes with software to support
		these beasts)
	- is there a postscript engine that fits these specs?

Now the tough question:

	Policy: without question, HUGE additional demands will be placed on
our computing facilities if each and every student had access to this printer
for high quality (troff) output.  Line printer listings, however must be
printed on this printer as it will replace one or more aging line printers.

	- who should get access?
	- how do you control access?
	- how do you recover supply costs?
	- have you tried a plan such as I am suggesting?  What were your
results?
	- have you experienced any abuses of your facility (ie. printing
posters, letters for outside organizations, etc)?  What did you do about
them?

In general I'd like to see some discussion of high quality output devices
for large numbers of people or high volumne applications.

--Dwight Mckay, ECN Text & Workstation Software Support
[arpanet: mckay@ee.ecn.purdue.edu, usenet: ...ihnp4!pur-ee!mckay]
[Compu-serve: 75776,1521, office: EE 348B, phone: (317) 494-3561]