Yeah you just moved the RIP upstream, rasterize before the rasterizer :) We did that for a few jobs that caused trouble. I haven't worked on the innards of tho

Yeah you just moved the RIP upstream, rasterize before the rasterizer :) We did that for a few jobs that caused trouble. I haven't worked on the innards of those machines but my suspicion is that it's a combination of 1) Not much RAM, to keep costs down, 2) An inability to handle a large number of resources i.e. no swapping out to slow storage on a least-recently-used principle or similar, and 3) extremely strict conformance to avoid surprises in output.