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

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.