[SunRescue] What Gem did I find?

[Ken Hansen]

James,

Just curious, but why couldn't they just build an IPC or IPX into the SPARCPrinter? Where I used to work they would simply take an IPC/IPX, fill it with RAM (IIRC) and shove the printer interface card in the box and go from there.

Actually, the printer only used a fraction of the "power" of these workstations, so a lesser system could have been included - this would have added about $1K???

Just curious,

Ken

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Lockwood [mailto:james at foonly.com]
> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2001 2:12 PM
> To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] What Gem did I find?
> 
> 
> The original SPARCprinter is an excellent example.  The 
> engine is 400dpi
> and capable of shooting pages through at 12ppm, but in 1991 building a
> renderer on the printer capable of processing Postscript at that rate
> would have cost a fortune.
> 
> With rendering on the host you moved the bottleneck, the overhead in
> blitting the bitmap out the video port only amounted to a 
> second or two
> even for a completely full page.  With a modern fast machine 
> rendering the
> Postscript you can sustain a full 12ppm regardless of the 
> content or size
> of the pages.  There's no memory limit to the rendering engine which
> normally plagues older printers.