The corollary of this was Display PostScript. At my first job we had a SPARCStation 2 with a SPARCprinter. The SPARCStation was a mighty wonder to behold, with a storage pedestal and a lovely OpenWindows GUI on a luxurious Sun monitor and color framebuffer. The operator sitting at the desk was often just a novice clerical worker, but we ran a few Internet services on the machine as well. However, our department depended on that SPARCprinter to spit out hundreds of sheets of paper daily.
We could not depend on the printer to stay functional, though. Have you heard of a Winmodem? SPARCprinters were essentially that: they were configured as a "dumb display device" where all the imaging logic was contained in the software and run on the server. A page was written in PostScript, rendered on the print server, and dispatched to the printer as if it were a framebuffer/monitor.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the server software was not so reliable, or the printer hardware wasn't reliable, and because of this peculiar symbiotic parasitism, whenever our printer wedged, our server was also toast. Every process went into "D" for device wait; load averages spiked and all our work ground to a halt. We would need to pull the worker off the desktop, reboot the whole server, and start over with the printer.
That printer haunted my dreams, all though my transition from clerk, to network operator, to sysadmin, and it wasn't until 2011 when I was able to reconcile with printers in general. I still miss SunOS 4 and the whole SPARC ecosystem, but good riddance to Display PostScript.