Ahh, my first workplace had a MicroVAX II and some SPARCstation 2s with a special place in my heart. We ran Ultrix/Motif and SunOS/OpenWindows, so these arcane screenies of MicroVMS, SunTools, and Display PostScript are educational for me.
The MicroVax was sort of the secondary, older system but it intrigued me, and I hacked on it, securing some career advancement along the way. I'd already saved our reputation and revenue bigtime by overhauling our authentication server. When word got around that I'd reconfigured the Ultrix kernel to my liking, I feared a reprimand but received a promotion to sysadmin and a 33% raise.
The SparcStation 2 was the jewel of the office and its printer was the bane of my existence. There was a storage pedestal and a SPARC Laser printer; this system was in a triple role as a desktop workstation, office print server, and customer/public Internet services of whatever sort existed before WWW.
Now the SPARC Printer used Display Postscript as its engine, and that's why I'm ranting about it here on this article. Display Postscript-based printers are like WinModems: they're essentially dumb devices, and IIUC, they appear somewhat like a monitor to the host system. So the Postscript engine runs on the host and then zaps rendered pages out to the device.
This is great in theory, and it's great in practice if you've got a dedicated print server and your printer never jams or fouls physically. Well guess what. We were heavy users on that thing, because everyone in the United States was phoning us asking how to get on the Internet, and we offered a free guide for that. So we printed a new copy and stuffed it in an envelope for every request!
When the printer hung, being dependent on the host system, its engine daemon hung in Device Wait on the server, and there was no way to unwedge it until we rebooted. So we'd all stop work, kick off the desktop user, reboot it, get the printer back, and try to pick up where we left off.
Upon promotion, I was provisioned with a SPARCstation LX, and I promptly eschewed OpenWindows in favor of twm.I ran rc, mh, Emacs, and sometimes I would fire up NCSA Mosaic, because these weirdos on the Internet were starting to "blog" about what they ate for lunch.
The MicroVax was sort of the secondary, older system but it intrigued me, and I hacked on it, securing some career advancement along the way. I'd already saved our reputation and revenue bigtime by overhauling our authentication server. When word got around that I'd reconfigured the Ultrix kernel to my liking, I feared a reprimand but received a promotion to sysadmin and a 33% raise.
The SparcStation 2 was the jewel of the office and its printer was the bane of my existence. There was a storage pedestal and a SPARC Laser printer; this system was in a triple role as a desktop workstation, office print server, and customer/public Internet services of whatever sort existed before WWW.
Now the SPARC Printer used Display Postscript as its engine, and that's why I'm ranting about it here on this article. Display Postscript-based printers are like WinModems: they're essentially dumb devices, and IIUC, they appear somewhat like a monitor to the host system. So the Postscript engine runs on the host and then zaps rendered pages out to the device.
This is great in theory, and it's great in practice if you've got a dedicated print server and your printer never jams or fouls physically. Well guess what. We were heavy users on that thing, because everyone in the United States was phoning us asking how to get on the Internet, and we offered a free guide for that. So we printed a new copy and stuffed it in an envelope for every request!
When the printer hung, being dependent on the host system, its engine daemon hung in Device Wait on the server, and there was no way to unwedge it until we rebooted. So we'd all stop work, kick off the desktop user, reboot it, get the printer back, and try to pick up where we left off.
Upon promotion, I was provisioned with a SPARCstation LX, and I promptly eschewed OpenWindows in favor of twm.I ran rc, mh, Emacs, and sometimes I would fire up NCSA Mosaic, because these weirdos on the Internet were starting to "blog" about what they ate for lunch.