Originally Posted by
pitz
Here's another reason. Basically the mainframe software that runs a lot of the dispatch/gate processes is pre-historic. So they'd have to spend a lot of money re-coding it to actually generate the Postscript output that a modern laser printer needs to render pages.
Actually, there are at least a few (comparatively) inexpensive software applications ("middleware") that can be installed on a server and intercept the print stream, repurpose it, and output it to any number of technologies.
I did a project about 10 years ago for a very large national grocery store chain. Our software sat on their network and "pretended" to be a printer. All of their mainframe print for 5 production print centers was rerouted to this application, which looked at the print data, determined what the format/layout should be - based on the content of the print data, reformatted the data as needed to output to print and/or email and/or archive and/or document management system and/or bit bucket. The software was able to make decisions based on the content of the print data and determine whether it was looking at an order summary, or a warehouse inventory, or a payroll check/deposit advice - and decide which specific printer on the network to print to.
The beauty of a system like this is that no changes need to be made to the upstream system. No need to drag COBOL or Fortran programmers out of retirement. No need to spend time and money trying to find people who have actual real-world experience with PSF programming, or other mainframe OUTQ configuration tools.
And the best part? The total cost of the solution - including roughly 500 man-hours of installation/configuration/testing was under $150k. Obviously something like moving all gate printing to a central system like this would cost more than that, but it would likely ROI in a very short time.
That said, the benefits of fan-fold paper for applications like this are hard to replicate with laser print. You would need a higher-end HP, or a workgroup class Lexmark/Xerox/Canon/Ricoh/etc printer with an integrated stapler/finisher. Putting one of those at *every* gate in the system would be very expensive to roll out, and those systems tend to require more maintenance than line printers, and to go down hard when they go down.
(The above comes from 30 years experience in the copier/printer industry - as a service tech, a systems analyst, a solutions implementation engineer, etc, etc, etc)
Originally Posted by
piper28
I've got to think most of the reasoning has to be because of interfacing with software that in general is really old. Dot matrix printers in general you could pretty much just dump the characters that you wanted printed out the parallel port and the printer would produce that output. No drivers or anything. In general, lasers and ink jets require more processing, and you're not just sending raw characters to the printer. Course, in general they're more capable of printing graphics too because of that, but that's not likely a need for the airlines.
Being able to load up a whole box of paper instead of unwrapping reams probably doesn't hurt either.
I'm assuming these are still in general parallel port driven, which means the parallel port continues to live well past when the manufacturers started to try killing it off.
Actually, a lot of this class of printer are serial connected, rather than parallel. Serial cables can be longer - up to 15 meters, compared to a max of 15 feet for parallel cables. They also use more compact connectors and can be extended via serial to RJ45 (ethernet) adapters, which can stretch that maximum distance up to 45 meters. Many of those little line printers are also capable of connecting directly to an ethernet network.
Sorry if this was only interesting to copier/printer geeks....