🚀 go-pugleaf

ELE@psuvm.psu.edu (Jeremy):

>>>I heard that at Penn State, they changed the laser printers so that
>>>they need to recieve verification before they print - this comes in
>>>the form of a card-reader which reads their venda-card and charges
>>>them $1 a page for printouts from the laser printers.  Sounds workable
>>>to me - though I've not too much information about it.
> 
> I did some research on this since I'm at PSU (grad).  The price across
> campus is 25c per page from the vendacard (costs 50c) for a laserprinter 
> hooked to the Mac.
> 
> The best price I could find downtown is also 25c a page (Gnomen Copy) flat 
> rate although Kinko's was 25c/page for 30 or more copies, 50c/page for 
> 10 or fewer.
>
> The worst price was $2.50 a page from Kopease, who wanted to retype the
> document as well as print it out.

Here at the University of Saskatchewan we have a campus wide Ethernet network
that covers most of the buildings on campus.  This handles ALL our DECnet
traffic, TCP/IP traffic, Appletalk traffic, etc.  We use the DEC Pathworks
system for our PC labs.

The Printing Services department on campus is in charge of doing all copying,
etc.   What we've done is put 300dpi Postscript laser printers in two of the
copy centres, one on either side of campus.  Our Computing Services dept.
has gotten out of the laser-printing business altogether.

These printers are connected to the Campus network.  We can print to them
from any machine attached to the network, including VAX minis and 
workstations running VMS or Ultrix, MS-DOS systems running Pathworks, and
Macs connected to the campus Appletalk. 

All the printing ends up going through a print queue on one of our VAX/VMS
computers.

Our printing services department charges about 20 cents (Canadian) per page.

We've found this to be a great solution.  Printing Services is already well
versed in photocopy machines, etc.  They are also set up to handle money.
They keep the printers in tip-top shape.  All Computing Services has to do 
is make sure the network and queues are running correctly.

- Kevin Lowey