Oh, do I share the fun with those without grey hair...
RIP = Raster Image Processor, often a standalone computer acting as a front-end for a printer. It accepts jobs, runs the PostScript, and converts it to a format native to the printer.
At some point, it has to render a bitmap. Conceptually simple, but the frame buffer is going to be multiple megabytes.
When PostScript was young, megabytes of RAM could require thousands of dollars.
The CPU running PostScript was itself a rather powerful machine for the time.
And then, the software license for the PostScript running on the RIP...
I ran a network of 200 Macs, and for a number of years, the most powerful computer on that network was the printer.
I have an sgi o2 that was originally the RIP for some sort of fancy print system. Which blew my mind. I mean sure the o2 was sort of the low end system of it's generation. But that is still a 10-20 thousand dollar computer. And you are wasting it on the infernal print queue.
I sort of get it now, it's 1996, you have a million dollar printer, you want to make sure the computer assigned to handle the images can keep up with it, the o2 is probably a good fit.
The other fun fact about the o2 is apparently the oil companies liked it. It is a unified memory architecture. On the one hand this means it's graphics were far slower than it's big brother, the octane, On the other the octane has at most 16 megabytes of video memory. you could get close to a gigabyte of memory in the o2 and and you could use as much of that for video memory as you could get away with. Great for those large geological survey visualizations.
RIP = Raster Image Processor, often a standalone computer acting as a front-end for a printer. It accepts jobs, runs the PostScript, and converts it to a format native to the printer.
At some point, it has to render a bitmap. Conceptually simple, but the frame buffer is going to be multiple megabytes.
When PostScript was young, megabytes of RAM could require thousands of dollars.
The CPU running PostScript was itself a rather powerful machine for the time.
And then, the software license for the PostScript running on the RIP...
I ran a network of 200 Macs, and for a number of years, the most powerful computer on that network was the printer.