🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Firth <filter@firthcom.demon.co.uk> wrote:

[snip]
> For an art department, it is profoundly cruel to set up printer on an
> AppleTalk connection. They generally create huge bitmaps for printing
> and AppleTalk is limited to 230Kb/s which means a really big bit map can
> take a long time to print.

This isn't strictly true: LocalTalk connections normally run at 230400
bit/s, but it's possible (with a bit of extra hardware) to persuade it
to run at 920000 bit/s (just needs an external clock; the serial ports
on all Macs[1] are happy running at this speed).  You can run AppleTalk
over Ethernet, which means you can get 10Mbit/s with no trouble.

Having said that, I'm not sure you're right about the cruelty of such a
move.  An A4 600dpi bitmap is about 34 x 10^6 pixels.  At 230400 bit/s,
that takes about 2 to 2.5 minutes.  Not especially fast, I'll grant you,
but not all *that* slow.  Of course, you might have brain-dead software
that means it take 8 times longer than that (1 byte/pixel) in which case
it'll be hideous.  And as soon as someone else uses the network for
anything, things will slow down yet more.

[snip]

Rowland.

[1] True, but...  some 68000 Macs CPUs have trouble with serial port
speeds over 500000 bit/s so the fact that the serial port doesn't
complain doesn't help much; and the iMac might not have normal Mac
serial ports but since it's not yet on sale in the UK it doesn't count
(yet).

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