Excuse me for not quoting previous posts, but my initial private reply
to Ron, also somewhat "biting" as Wirt confessed that his was, but I
said rather bluntly:

> Then why, pray tell, is there no supported AND functional method of
> connecting *ANY* printer to a 3000?  A plain line printer.  I simply
> do not follow the "pushing away the competition" argument in this
> case.

> I have ESPUL *and* Formation and won't give up either one even *IF*
> CSY gets network printing (plain, vanilla network printing mind you)
> working reliably.

An additional point, our 9000 has no problems with the printers, and
while it doesn't have MPE's "page level recovery", it does know when the
printer goes astray and will restart the job *by*itself* a couple of
pages back.  This is true of the 4000 series Laserjets and the D640.

Windows98 even comes stock with a D640 driver (they have hundreds, if
not thousands of drivers).  MPE network printing implementation is
exteremely elegant in the supporting infrastructure (online config,
classes, sysgen ID suport, spooling subsystem integration, etc).  But
the driver itself stinks.  That is the *sole* problem, and as Wirt
pointed out, appears to the outside observer that it can't be that big
of a problem, aside from the fact that they are trying to roll *all* PCL
printers into one driver.

Network printing has been the biggest let-down since the optical mark
sense card reader of the classic days and the FCARD intrinsic (yes, we
tried to do grades this way.  Once.)

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>