The bank I worked for had a modest (~30 servers) Banyan VINES network and most of the printers were connected to servers. But server-connected printers were not ideal as some sorts of maintenance required rebooting the server. Banyan later introduced a thing called "PC Print" so you could use a random networked PC as a printer server. This was much better and these serial-to-parallel converters started being disused. :-)

Wade.