[geeks] Printers, Printers, Programming, Terminal Servers, and Writingish

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, September 4, 2001 at 20:19:27 (EDT), Mike Dombrowski wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] Printers, Printers, Programming, Terminal Servers,  and Writingish
>
> I also want a laser printer that understands postscript and has a 
> network interface. 100baseT would be nice but 100baseT would work. The 
> cheaper the better.

Look around for any modern Apple LaserWriter.  You don't need 100baseTX
on a laser, at least not anything smaller than a very large, hundreds of
pages per minute, monster machine, especally not if you don't have too
much traffic on your net, and/or you have a good 10/100 switch.  Even
printing dense images you'll be able to keep well ahead of the print
engine (with with that kind of input won't be going full tilt anyway)

I've had tons of laser printers in lots of scenarios and I've never had
a better one than an Apple one.  One place I worked had an original
laserwriter that had printed about 300,000 pages.  That's ten big
boxes.  It was still going strong, but slowly of course, when I left.
It may still be going today (6 years later!  ;-).  The only other
printer I had which came close was a Dataproducts LZR1200 with a real
Adobe PS engine.  I still have one I bought used.  Unfortunately it
takes very expensive drums and fusers and it's only really of the ALW-1
generation too.  I also still have a used Varityper that had been used
in production at a large legal office for many years.  It's 1200dpi, but
async only.

I've now got an ALW 16/600PS that's absolutely wonderful.  In-house
Apple wouldn't requisition these to anyone with a workgroup of about 16
people or fewer.  That's a 16ppm 600dpi printer with a very good engine,
takes ordinary SIMMs, and has internal and external SCSI ports for font
cache disks.

I ended up installing netatalk to drive it though as the lpd built into
it isn't smart enough to report printing errors, but that's easy and
quite workable on most any unix.

I got mine almost brand new from a leasing company's second-hand store
for an absolute steal (they didn't know what to do with it) for $64.

They still sell used around here for about $500-$900, depending on their
condition, even with tens of thousands of pages on the counter.

> All the recent talk about formatting languages and my long desire to 
> learn one has sparked my interest but I have no idea which one to 
> learn. Any suggestions for something? I'd really like it if there was a 
> "Introduction to ..." or a tutorial website.

lout.  hands down the best formatting language around.

	http://snark.niif.spb.su/~uwe/lout/lout.html

	ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.24.tar.gz

comes with complete already-formatted manuals and user's guide, and
slides from a tutorial.

there's a _very_ helpful mailing list too:

	<mailto:lout-request at ptc.spbu.ru?subject=subscribe>

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>