That's all fine, Wirt, but where do I buy a JetDirect card that feeds a
serial printer?

Tracy Pierce

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 10:20 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Network Printing
>
>
> Thomas roots for a non-HP solution to network printing:
>
> > Troy Wireless has a line of one and two port serial print
> servers similar
> >  to Intel's, but if all the printers are in one location,
> Lantronix' ETS16PR
> >  16 port rack mount print server would work quite nicely
> and probably offer
> >  a significant per-port savings.
>
> Let me argue the opposite case, if you don't mind. I am very
> impressed with
> HP's external JetDirect cards. HP said at the outset that the HP3000's
> network printing would only work with HP JetDirect cards and,
> HP being my
> "trusted partner," I took them at their word, thus they're
> the only form of
> print servers we've ever used. Nonetheless, I couldn't be
> happier with them.
>
> We also use HP's free JetAdmin software on all of our PC's. JetAdmin
> duplicates the network printing software that's on the HP3000, thus
> everything tends to work in a highly coordinated fashion. As
> I tell people
> who attend class here and who I show how our network printing
> is set up, I'm
> a person of nearly infinite patience, but if a process begins
> to take much
> more than a tenth of second, I begin to get quite antsy. The JetDirect
> printing tends to work very nicely for everything we do, and
> works well
> within the bounds of my nearly infinite patience.
>
> We use HP's external JetDirect Plus EX print servers on all
> of our non-HP
> "foreign" printers (Tektronix color lasers, Apple
> LaserWriters, etc.) and
> they work very well with every PCL- or PostScript-capable
> printer we've tried
> so far. But we've also found that we have had to use them
> with some of our HP
> printers as well, even though those printers already had
> internal JetDirect
> cards in them. Some of the firmware in some of these older
> printers simply
> doesn't work with the HP3000's network printing. We've
> corrected that too by
> putting external JetDirect cards on those printers as well,
> as you can see in
> the webpage that I put last year during the manufacture of
> the calendars:
>
>     http://aics-research.com/calendar.html
>
> We've never used any form of the external JetDirect cards
> other than those
> with the single port, simply because none of our "foreign"
> printers are
> physically close enough to one another to have any of the
> three printer port
> cards be of any interest to us. But if I did have a long row of such
> printers, such as you might find in a row of teller windows
> in a credit union
> or a bank, putting a 3-port JetDirect card every few feet
> would seem to me to
> be a nearly ideal solution. These cards have proven themselves to work
> without fuss or bother with the HP3000's network printing,
> and while other
> people have been able to make non-HP print servers work with
> the HP3000's
> network printing protocols, I tend to be very prone to
> solutions that are
> more or less guaranteed to work flawlessly under all
> circumstances, and so
> far, after three years usage, the JetDirect cards are doing
> that. We've never
> had the slightest form of hiccup with them.
>
> Wirt Atmar
>
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