EDITORIAL FROM AN IBM DEALER

[Anonymous]

A lingering death
I
got my first car in 1980 when I was Junior in college. It was an
orangey-yellow Ford Maverick, a 1972 with about 70k miles on it. It was
kind of ugly, but that kind of ugliness added to its beauty in an odd
way. I wasn’t afraid to take things apart, such as my busted old
lawnmower. It was putting them back together again that messed me up.
So, when I lifted the hood of my “banana-boat” Ford, the simple
straight-six engine was distinct — pulleys, distributor, alternator,
etc. — I could really understand what I was looking at, even if I
wasn’t totally sure how it all worked. Whenever the car was in for
service, I would try to peer over the shoulder to watch what the
mechanics were doing. I didn’t want to make him nervous looking over
his shoulder. I asked if he would show me the distributor, because I
never really understood what it was and why it was such a big deal.
They used a strobe light to check the timing and I thought the whole
thing was very cool. I felt more comfortable with the whole idea of unde
rstanding
the inner workings of the engine. It was the sort of aimless
exploration and discovery that a layman could do in those years. It was
in that spirit, that I also began to dig into the fledgling
microcomputers at the time. (Nowadays, I lift up the hood my car and
don’t really know what’s what, nor would I even thing of trying to fix
anything, excepting that maybe that poking around and looking at stuff
would fix it.)

I got my first microcomputer in 1982, an Atari
800 with a real keyboard, a cassette tape backup (no hard drives yet),
and a Basic coder. It attached to a black and white TV. After I got
simple stuff going, I wrote a really stupid and clumsy address list
report. Problem was that without a printer, it did little good except
suck down a lot of evening and weekend time. I bought a used 150lb
Centronics 101 printer with its new Centronics parallel port in
addition to serial. Just getting it out of the car and up the stairs
was an exercise unto itself. Using the printer and the computer, I was
successfully able to actually “do” something. My mother’s high school
class reunion was my first customer (for their mailing list). It helped
that my mom and her friend were the reunion chairwomen. Anyway, that’s
where this began. That was when I could actually make my computer do
stuff, and printing was my interest. I explored the sending and
receiving of data and manipulated the sequences of Hex code I sent to
the printer.I monitored the serial port for its Hex responses. I gained
a deep understanding that it takes to establish communications between
CPU and printer..

Fast forward to today. The technology has
heaped layer upon layer of function onto simple 8-bit byte code which
runs printers at their most fundamental level. It is the understanding
of the fundamentals which is commonly not taught, and the programmers,
engineers, and designers, giving short shrift to “boring” old impact
printers, seem to assume higher level language and interfaces in their
interoperations.

It against this backdrop that I present the
following extremely important analysis. The next release of operating
system for the iSeries (AS/400), OS/400, will NOT SUPPORT SNA. Very few
people understand how vast the ramifications will be for printing. IBM
surely knows that many of the workarounds for printing over TCP/IP
rely, at their most basic level, on an SNA link from the host. IBM’s
solution? Advanced Function Printing (AFP) using Intelligent Printer
Data Stream (IPDS) for FLOW CONTROL over TCP/IP. Unless you happen to
have seen this coming, you may not have IPDS implemented, and replacing
all those impact printers (or dealing with Host Print Transform and PCL
bandwidth and processing overhead) with new devices is going cause
quite a lot of consternation. The whole concept of the “Black Hole of
Printing” will become familiar to those who have puzzled at the lost
jobs, strange outputs and flaky printer performance and network traffic
they create.

I have been and will continue to offer solutions to
these complexities. The effort and cost that so many people will expend
on understanding the implications and potential solutions to this issue
will be astounding. I’ll cut through the variables for you and help you
through the most vexing challenges.

David T. Mendelson
Argecy Computer Corporation
27280 Haggerty Road C21
Farmington Hills, MI 48331
248-324-1800 x122
248-324-1900 fax
http://www.argecy.com
dave@argecy.com

[Author]

October 10, 2007 at 11:59 AM