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Wow, what does an HP LJ4000 laser printer need a processor that's also used in an SGI workstation for? I looked into the Wikipedia article and although it's a

• linuxlizard 11y ago
  Probably Postscript and PCL rendering in firmware. Requires a lot of memory and CPU. Current printers use custom ASICs with specialized rendering hardware.
• kjs3 11y ago
  Rendering to a piece of paper based on a Postscript/PCL/etc definition is similar to rendering to a screen. Both a video subsystem and a printer want to do that fast.
• flomo 11y ago
  Until a few years ago, I owned a LJ4000, and it still had to stop and think for a bit if you were printing a picture or something complicated. Earlier laser printers could be incredibly slow - an Apple LaserWriter took about 30 minutes to print one page of a 'zine' we were were working on.
• prodmerc 11y ago
  I remember the LaserJet 4000 and the 4550 (color beast, the startup sequence sounded amazing with all those motors and the always-on fans). Worked flawlessly for hundreds of thousands of pages. It had expandable RAM, and you could send files to the print queue inside the printer via LPT or Ethernet, and it did PostScript rendering inside, which was quite convenient when printing lots of stuff (reduced the amount of data you had to send, and no issues with interrupted printing). I guess that's why it needed its own processor.