[rescue] Score

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Charles Monett wrote:
>> Just a matter of opinion, isn't ~20ish ppm a bit low for printing speed?
>>
>> My experience has been that's the territory of the form printers and
>> some B&W(HP 8500dn?) lasers.
>
> 8500DN is an 11x17 color laser, and it's good for 24ppm in B/W.  It's a
> pretty serious departmental printer.  What kind of size printer are you
> used to that 20ppm is "a bit low"?

Well, almost 30 years ago the Xerox 9700 could do 120ppm, and
lower-end models could do 40-60ppm.  The 9700 was a beast.  It had a
duty cycle of something like a million pages a month.  Hell, they
probably just fed whole trees in one end of the thing. :-)

I fondly remember that at CMU you could send a decent sized program
listing (say, 40-50 pages) from your PERQ or Alto to the Dover (a
lower-end model, as I recall, driven by an Alto named "ruby"), and in
the minute or so it took to walk from the Spice Rack or the main CS
dept terminal room to the printer to fetch your output, it was most
likely stapled and dropped into the output trays alphabetically by the
user's last name on the cover page.  I think the only output I have
from those days is a HOSTS.TXT from ~1981.  All the hosts on the
ARPAnet in three pages.  Wow.

Cheers,
-- Chris