naiman-1984-introduction-to-the-lisa

19 The Lisa's Hardware
a third as detailed, prints out faster, and is ideal for
informal memos and notes. And finally there's draft
mode-it's much faster (and much uglier); you can only
use it for text, not graphics.
Having the choice of three different speeds and
three different levels of quality is quite handy; I've
shown you the difference between them in Figure 1-4.
(I didn't change any of the typefaces in the draft mode
sample; that's just the way draft mode handles them.
It also eliminates underlining and screws up the spacing
between words and sentences. But your text is there
to be checked.)
In draft mode, both the Imagewriter and Apple's
old dot-matrix printer reach a nominal speed of 120
characters per second, which is equivalent to about 1200
actual words per minute (or 1440 official, typing-class,
four-letters-and-a-space words per minute). I say "nominal"
because most dot-matrix printers don't actually
achieve their advertised speeds (although my subjective
impression is that these came close).
In high-resolution mode, the printer sometimes sits
and waits for the computer to figure out what it wants
to do; this is one of the clearest examples of the 68000
chip being overloaded. Even in normal mode, printouts
take a while.
Some people feel that the dot-matrix printer in
high-resolution mode produces a better-looking business
letter than a formed-character (daisy wheel) printer
can. Two clear advantages are that you can easily shift
back and forth between type fonts, and you can integrate
charts and other graphics into the text.
The Lisa lets you do background printing. This
means you can work on Document B while the Lisa
is printing out Document A "in the background." Unfortunately,
although the Lisa's spirit is willing, its electronics
are weak. When a printout is in progress, most other
activities slow to a crawl. Working while printing in
the background demands more patience than it's worth.
Communicating with other computers is yet another
thing the Lisa is equipped for. It has two RS-232