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From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: How did they make the printer so cheap?
Message-ID: <25141@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 88 21:51:22 GMT
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In article <24895@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes:
>In article <5807@zodiac.UUCP> jshelton@ads.com (John L. Shelton) writes:
>>How can NeXT possibly make a postscript printer to sell for $2000?
>>I'm afraid to find out, but I suspect that the printer has no CPU
>>and memory.  More likely, the printer uses the NeXT CPU and memory.
>
>Correct.  The PostScript imaging happens in the cube, then the bits
>get blasted, real fast, across the cable to the Canon engine in the
>printer.  I'm curious about, in a Bezerkeley remote line printer
>daemon environment (one cube with a printer per cluster), whether the
>imaging happens in the print server cube or in the cube that
>originated the print job, and what are the tradeoffs in each one's
>CPU and network bandwidth, etc.

It turns out that the remote lpr daemons ship PostScript across the
network (using the standard TranScript stuff), which is clearly a more
efficient way of describing a picture that was already in PostScript
than shipping a bitmap.  The imaging is done on the cube that hosts
the printer.  The CPU running the imaging software will hardly sweat,
even with everything else going on, so the user won't complain much
about that.  The imager can image much faster than this printer can
print (8ppm), so the bottleneck is in the printer.

At 400dpi resolution, a full page bitmap is almost 2Mb.  If a cube is
a printer host for several heavy printer users, it will be
advantageous to add extra memory (in 4Mb SIMM increments).  Otherwise,
you might start (horrors! :-) exercising the VM system and swapping.
If the bitmap only uses 2Mb of that 4Mb addition, then the user of the
printer server gets 2Mb for free, and will hardly complain.
-=-
Zippy sez,								--Bob
Didn't I buy a 1951 Packard from you last March in Cairo?