Mobile, Alabama-based QMS Inc is very proud of its new QMS-PS 2000 departmental laser printer, claiming it to be the fastest PostScript printer available and capable of serving the text and graphics printing needs of a department of up to 50 people. The QMS-PS 2000 can simultaneously serve DEC, Apple Macintosh, MS-DOS and Unix computers, and can be used on Ethernet, AppleTalk and DECnet networks. It’s not certain that it’s really anything to be proud of, indicating as it does that laser printing has become all too complicated, but QMS boasts that the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R3000 RISC that drives the machine is the fastest processor ever used in a laser printing system, and has more computing power than most computers. The printer uses the company’s Emulation Sensing Processor artificial intelligence technology to recognise and automatically switch between the four most common printer languages used by software applications: Adobe PostScript, DEC LN03+, and Hewlett-Packard PCL and HP-GL. Direct Ethernet connection for DEC and Unix networks and AppleTalk for Macintosh networks are available now and support for other networks such as Token Ring, NetWare, Lan Manager and Ethertalk will be available later this year. All four host interfaces – Ethernet, AppleTalk, serial and parallel can accept data at the same time. It also has up to 100Mb of memory and disk for spooling and lists for $16,000 in its basic configuration.
