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Yeah, I'm a bit jaded here. You're right that they made a ton of money, but left a lot of great work to fester, even in laser printing. My perspective comes wor

Yeah, I'm a bit jaded here. You're right that they made a ton of money, but left a lot of great work to fester, even in laser printing. My perspective comes working in Xerox engineering on high volume printers in the early 1990s. PARC folks repeatedly came through with great ideas about how to make the printers faster and cheaper (at the same time). My favorite demo they gave us was replacing the PDP-11 inside the printer, which was becoming increasingly expensive, with a Sun SPARCstation. They had done all the work to do a full demo on the prototype printer we were working on. Everything was much faster and it provided a lot more features. Plus development printer software could be developed in C or other languages, not just assembly. They were effectively told "that looks nice" and sent back to Palo Alto. That was hard to watch.

dhosek 3y ago
I remember working with the Xerox high-volume printers (8700/9700 series) in the 80s. They were workhorses that could print high volumes at high speeds (for the 1990 TUG conference at Texas A&M, Thomas Reid printed up note pads for (I think just some) of the conference attendees which featured 128 pages showing grey-scale bitmaps of the cmr10 typeface enlarged to fill most of a 5.5x8.5 page with the attendee’s name at the top of the page. He commented about how it was a few thousand pages, all unique. The big catch was that the on-board software on the printers was full of bugs and it was easy to cause the printer to crash (which Xerox called a rollover) which took it out of service for 10–15 minutes which doesn’t sound so bad except when you’re regularly printing a hundred pages a minute for a few thousand users, downtime can be a problem. The smaller 2700-series printers had no ability to handle graphics or use any fonts except the fonts programmed in ROM.

dhosek 3y ago

I remember working with the Xerox high-volume printers (8700/9700 series) in the 80s. They were workhorses that could print high volumes at high speeds (for the 1990 TUG conference at Texas A&M, Thomas Reid printed up note pads for (I think just some) of the conference attendees which featured 128 pages showing grey-scale bitmaps of the cmr10 typeface enlarged to fill most of a 5.5x8.5 page with the attendee’s name at the top of the page. He commented about how it was a few thousand pages, all unique. The big catch was that the on-board software on the printers was full of bugs and it was easy to cause the printer to crash (which Xerox called a rollover) which took it out of service for 10–15 minutes which doesn’t sound so bad except when you’re regularly printing a hundred pages a minute for a few thousand users, downtime can be a problem. The smaller 2700-series printers had no ability to handle graphics or use any fonts except the fonts programmed in ROM.