With regards to printer rip(raster image processer) machines. We think of this as an easy task today but historically they had to be surprisingly powerful. When

With regards to printer rip(raster image processer) machines. We think of this as an easy task today but historically they had to be surprisingly powerful. When I bought my sgi o2 I found it had lived it's previous life as a rip. Which blew my mind, you have this 20000 dollar machine. and they were using it for a glorified print server. Other examples are the first apple laser printer which was their most powerful computer by a large amount when it came out. And the anecdote of the sys-admin who traced mysterious long printer jobs that never printed anything back to an enterprising engineer who had figured out that it was the most powerful computer in the building and had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to take advantage of it.