ABSTRACT
During the early development stage of local area networking (LAN) technology, the sharing of expensive laser printers was one of the primary reasons cited for using that relatively new technology. Although the price of laser printers has significantly declined over the past decade, network printing remains an important application supported by LANs. The first series of network operating systems that were developed provided support for network printing via the attachment of printers to the serial or parallel ports of file servers. Although this option limits the number of network printers that can be used prior to purchasing a license to operate another file server, it minimizes network traffic, which can be an important consideration when a network has a high level of activity. When a file server supports directly connected printers, data leaves the server’s print queues at the serial or parallel port interface speed, which is typically a fraction of the network operating rate.
