🚀 go-pugleaf

Disclaimer: I work for DEC and I have worked a little bit with the
product group that produced this printer. Everything I tell you here is
completely true, but you have to keep in mind that I am an employee.

We have an LPS40; it is one of the first shipped. I enabled accounting
for it on April 9, 1987. Since then it has printed 27557 pages, of
which about 1000 were 11x17 paper and the rest were 8.5x11 paper.
Very roughly, it prints about 1000 pages per working day.

For line printer listings, simple text formatter output, and so forth,
it prints at nearly the rated speed of 40 ppm. Most files generated by
troff and Scribe and TeX print at about 30ppm, though it is possible to
produce such files that slow it down to, say, 15-20ppm by excessive use
of font size changes and included figures.

Here are some actual numbers, culled out of the Transcript log file for
the machine. These are lifted verbatim:

  psbanner: ishtar:jg  Job: paper.psc  Date: Tue Jun  2 12:24:24 1987
  lps40.comm: Tue Jun  2 12:24:31 -I- Start jg@ishtar
  lps40.comm: Tue Jun  2 12:35:31 -S- End jg@ishtar, 207 pages printed
This is a troff job; it is the X Windows/C Library interface manual.
The file is 1.2 megabytes. It printed in exactly 11 minutes, which is a
processing rate of 18.8 pages per minute.


  psbanner: granite:rost  Job: doc.ps  Date: Tue Jun  2 09:44:54 1987
  lps40.comm: Tue Jun  2 09:45:03 -I- Start rost@granite
  lps40.comm: Tue Jun  2 09:48:27 -S- End rost@granite, 100 pages printed
This is another troff job. It is a troff job that uses only a few fonts
but that has a number of illustrations. It printed at 29.4 pages per
minute.


  psbanner: acetes:boggs  Job: tproc.lst  Date: Mon May 25 18:37:59 1987
  lps40.comm: Mon May 25 18:38:11 -I- Start boggs@acetes
  lps40.comm: Mon May 25 18:44:42 -S- End boggs@acetes, 237 pages printed
I had to search back this far in the logs to find a large text file. Most
of the text files that were printed were just a few tens of pages. This
one is a microcode listing of some hardware gadget; the listed lines
were too long to print in portrait orientation so the listing was
printed with 200-character-long lines in 7-point type, in landscape
mode. This file printed at 36.4 pages per minute. It was 2 megabytes
long.

  psbanner: saturn:nettles  Job: txWindow.c  Date: Wed May 20 15:58:41 1987
  lps40.comm: Wed May 20 15:58:47 -I- Start nettles@saturn
  lps40.comm: Wed May 20 16:03:38 -S- End nettles@saturn, 183 pages printed
This was the largest "ordinary text file" I could find in the log. It
is an ordinary listing of a C program (a text editor written at
Berkeley). The file printed at 37.7 pages per minute.

I have no idea what the rated duty cycle of this machine is. You would
have to consult the product literature for that. Where this machine
really shines is not so much in raw duty cycle, but in high-speed
demand printing. Getting a 207-page typeset manual (with multiple fonts and
included graphics) in 11 minutes is really pretty wonderful.