Hello Sam!
In a message to Robert Obrien  Sam Ewalt wrote:
SE> printing on a dot matrix printer. You wrote:
SE> -> because the printing is graphical in nature and a lot of information
SE> -> is being passed to the printer.
SE> Understood quite clearly. Three to five minutes a pages
SE> seems tolerable considering the slowness of the equipment
SE> I'm fooling around with. But, there were very long periods
SE> of time when nothing at all was happening, the printer
SE> wasn't printing nor was the hard drive light coming on.
SE> It (the XT and the Okidata 92) just sat there silent for
SE> up to five minutes or more. Then it would start printing
SE> again. It took an hour to print a five page banner.
SE> Seems to me it should do better than that!
Yep, should, though on an XT, with NO EMS/XMS to use for a
spooler, Ram Disk, or swap file, it will be slow. Even an upgrade
to a 286 would help, as it CAN access high memory, and EMS. The
problem with the printing, IS its graphical nature, and no access
to memory above 640K to help speed things up. I would imagine
that having either a software ramdisk/ems memory expansion card
would help alleviate some of the speed bottleneck, let me know if
you can't find one available somewhere, as I do have 2 spare AST
boards and 1MB of DIP ram available.
Later
Chris Martin
The MARS Station BBS 
A GeoWorks supporting BBS
... An Authorized BBS UTILITEEZ Software Distribution Site..
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