Multi-Spoolers

[Ihnat]

A fellow named John Collins, over the 'Big Water' (in England) distributed
a spooler over net.sources a couple of years ago that we've been running
ever since on the office machine.  It offers multiple printer support,
along with forms support, printer initialization, a simple accounting mechanism,
a fairly nice control interface (allowing suspension and cancellation of
jobs on a per-job basis), etc.  It uses only vanilla signals to communicate
between processes that comprise the spool package, and doesn't use 'signal-
answerback' signalling, so it is (rather rarely) subject to lost-signal
hits; but it's proven to be the best package we've found for the features
offered.

I haven't spoken with John for a year or so; I really should give him a
call, as he indicated that he was then planning some enhancements that
would be 'nice'.  I understand that h is (or was then!) marketing it in
the UK, but released it in the US because he didn't care for the hassles
of trying to defend it overseas. (don't ask me about legality; I'm just
the bitbeater in this instance.)  I agreed to be willing to be a source
and semi-support on this side of the ocean, but I suspect I ought to talk
to him again.  In any case, the package as released at that time is available
through me (I think its distribution predates mod.sources); Caveat Utilitor.
Bug reports accepted, action as possible.  Enough interest, and I'll try
to track John down...
-- 
	Dave Ihnat
	Analysts International Corporation
	(312) 882-4673
	ihnp4!aicchi!ignatz || ihnp4!homebru!ignatz