Subj : Re: Google Chromebook
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : tenser
Date : Fri Mar 03 2023 05:19:00

On 02 Mar 2023 at 05:44a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...
 
 pF> -=> tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
 pF> 
 pF>  te> At one point I had printed out basically the entire
 pF>  te> Net/2 BSD kernel (on a SPARCprinter, no less!).  I
 pF>  te> regret that now.
 pF> 
 pF> Wait, you regret having it or not having it?

I regret wasting all those trees. :-)  (Seriously, for something
that large, it's more efficient to read online.)

 pF> I worked at a law firm where every printer logged each page to a client
 pF> code to be billed back - except for one - it was a HP 4 sitting in the
 pF> server room. I printed every BBS software manual I had at the time.

Ha!  Nice.  When I was in college, there were strictly enforced
printer quotas (you could buy more, though) and a system where
you had to authorize jobs to print (which was actually kinda cool).
However, in the Mathematics library there was an HP printer
connected to the card-catalog lookup system; it was connected
to the local LAN, and if you knew how to get it to print out a
test page, it would spit out its IP address.  Like most HP printers,
it listened on TCP port 9100 (or whatever) and I realized you
could basically `cat` postscript to it, and it'd print all but
the last page.  So you could then telnet to it, type "showpage"
and the last page would print.

Saved a lot of quota that way....

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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