Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> A better example would be a web browser or word processor.  The
> program stops responding to further input until the printer has
> received the entire print job.  This bothered people enough that
> they came up with lpd/lpr ...

Back when lpr/lpd were first written, it was not just a matter of
the printer "receiving" the entire print job but of (nearly) the
entire job being completely printed.  Few printers had more than a
one-line buffer in those days.  There was also the matter of sharing
the printer among a considerable number of concurrent users, those
being the days of multiuser PDP-11's and VAXen.

BTW there was nothing particularly innovative about lpr/lpd --
mainframes like IBM 360's and even 7090's had been using print
spoolers for years.