A guy from Hewlett Packard came to talk about HP Laserjet printers and their application to the mainframe world. I was sort of hoping that the HP people could offer us some hope that our 3270 network printers could be integrated into some future LAN. (The bottom line: nope.)

HP is introducing a new High Speed Printer Interface for their laser printers. It is much faster than existing Centronics parallel interfaces, which are unable to keep up with the HP 3si printer (at 17 pages per minute, full-page graphics). HP is also introducing a "Modular I/O interface", which hangs directly off of your local area network -- no PC necessary. The MIO card talks directly to Netware, LAN Server and TCP/IP networks. Under Netware as a remote printer, it can handle about 30k bytes per second, and as a queue server about 180k.

HP really pushed their High Speed Printer Interface. They said that an IBM PS/2 model 95 (big honker) is buried by a 3si connected via parallel port. The conclusion: buy the new interface card.

The current HP printer driver for Windoze 3.0 is 30.3.86, and is available from HP Driver Distribution at 303-353-7650. Further information is available at HP First Fax: 208-344-4809.

I caught the guy after the presentation and quickly described our networking, ah, opportunities. He couldn't help much, and could only suggest that we take a look at the AFP printer support being announced for LANs soon. No help for us, I'm afraid.