A couple of years ago, in the run-up to LRS’ 40th anniversary celebration, I wrote a series of Blog articles outlining the origin of Enterprise Output Management software at LRS. At the time, we had just installed a large “History Wall” in our new building, which stepped through the evolution of LRS offerings over the last four decades.
More recently, network printing has been in the news, and not necessarily in a good way. Documents and print are more important than ever, so large organizations need a way to ensure the reliable and secure delivery of printed documents anywhere in their organizations.
As I was walking down the hallway this morning, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye that reminded me how long this issue — the need for a reliable print infrastructure — has been with us. Mounted on our history wall is the official notification from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for our original VPS mainframe-based output management solution. You won’t hear much about this offering in the news these days, and the many hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies still running it are very glad about that fact.
As far-fetched as it sounds today, the VPS solution revolutionized enterprise printing, as it allowed documents to be printed close to the users who requested them. The software transmitted documents across a network to the office where the users worked, instead of printing across a cable to a large, loud printer in the data center where the mainframe was located. After that, the documents were typically loaded on a cart and delivered by hand.
As outlined in a 24-page (!) sales brochure from the 1980’s below, corporate users were very pleased with how much more convenient printing became after implementing LRS software. Don’t believe me? Just check out the “before” and “after” pictures below!
