When I was studying Computer Science at my local University one of my teachers explained the methods used to handle job queues like round-robin, FIFO and others.
Then she told us a story about a print queue manager in an ancient computer mainframe. This manager was so badly designed that one day someone sent a print job and it took too much time and no print was delivered to him, so he decided to go home and forgot about that print job. That particular print job had a very little priority so it was always delayed.
The story tells us that this particular print job stood stuck in the print queue for months or years until someone resetted the computer and found that very old print job still waiting to be processsed.
Doesn’t sound believable to me. Unless the printer is going 24/7 it’s going to have at least some free time to print. It is plausible that through some sort of bug the job got delayed but was never put back in the queue.
That is a **very ** real scenario and it is still happening. You should try printing documents at the University of Calgary Mechanical Engineering Building sometime. Often, you can hit print and it goes into the print queue manager and nothing comes out of the printers. You have to keep sending print jobs to the print queue manager until one actually gets through.
If you open up the viewing window for the print queue manager, you will see a huge backlog of old documents waiting to get printed. Some of them are weeks old. If the System Administrator did not clear the print queue every few weeks, I’m pretty sure you could retain a print job for years.
I think the System Administrator should get some new print queue software that doesn’t make me go “FUCK!!! FUCK!!! FUCK!!!”.
Once, in the early 90s, I had done a very complex rendering in the beta version of some 3D software, on a Mac. I remember the rendering itself took several weeks. I sent the file to the imagesetter, which was in use pretty much 24/7, and it just remained in queue. About 5 months later, the company went out of business. For all I know, that file’s still waiting to get printed somewhere.
I’ve seen emails get delivered weeks or months after they got stuck in some MTA queue somewhere. Usually this was a result of something being misconfigured and the server being unable to properly route the email until it was reset. Start it up again and bam, 5000 month-old emails finally get delivered.
I’d say it’s plausible, especially on a mainframe and some sort of slow impact printer. If the priority was coded as “lowest” it could easily be parked in spool for a while.
Even today with high-speed roll-fed laser printers, some of our mainframe print jobs consume paper by the cubic foot - goof on the quantity by typing in “11” instead of “1” copy, and it’ll be delivered by forklift. :eek:
Although the story sounds like an urban legend, there are many things that could cause a print job to remain in the queue perpetually without being sent to the printer. If no one checks and no one cares, a print job might stay in purgatory just because some minor condition wasn’t met – wrong queue or printer designation, missing font, size exceeded, bug in the spooler, user no longer valid, execution time set to an impossible value, etc.
This is more likely to happen with medium-sized companies that don’t have experienced IT management that knows enough to check for such things. The features are used, but not maintained expertly.
Good to see that the University of Windsor Engineering labs aren’t the only ones that have this problem. There was one lab where the queue didn’t get cleared for 2 whole semesters. You would send your report to the printer, only to look at the queue and see it next to a syllabus from September.
You would think a building full of engineering professors would get off their asses and fix the software, or at least let the students have a crack at it.
