[Suns-at-Home] Printing via an Apple Airport Extreme from Solaris (and other stange boxes)

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Quoth Ben Lewis ...

> I've secretly always wanted to have console output being printed to a
> tractor feed printer using that cool fan fold paper with 
> green stripes.
> Oh well this will have to do I guess. I think I was born twenty years
> too late to be a real system operator.

You didn't miss much, really.

I started as a "computer operator" on an NCR 315 at an S&L (remember those?)
in Atlanta.  Although the reports coming out of the lineprinter were on
greenbar (with interleaved carbon paper, what a mess), the console output
was on white paper.  It was special paper, though:  each sheet was serial
numbered, from the factory.  The standard console printer was an IBM
Selectric typewriter; wires hand-soldered to the solenoids connected it to
special memory locations in the computer's CPU cabinet.

Y'see, as operators, we could directly change data (i.e. your account
balance, or our own) and the console printout was the only record of the
stuff we did.  The sheets were numbered to provide an audit trail.  If you
changed the paper, or broke the continuous "web", you had to file all sorts
of reports.

Of course, anyone with a piece of cardboard could have subverted that
process, but, as far as I know, no one in our shop ever did.

-Shel