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Printing In The Dim Times
Like the computers themselves, printers in the pre-PC era tended to be large, expensive, and centralized. The typical computer user of 1980 worked at a terminal connected to a computer some distance away. The printer was located near the computer and was under the watchful eyes of the computer’s operators.
When printers were expensive and centralized, as they often were in the early days of Unix, it was common practice for many users to share a printer. To identify print jobs be-
longing to a particular user, a banner page displaying the name of the user was often printed at the beginning of each print job. The computer support staff would then load up a cart containing the day’s print jobs and deliver them to the individual users.