Well, he did say that it had a base RAM count of 4MB, and that it could be upgraded with standard chips after that- so 4MB plus 96MB = 100MB right? It probably has two slots.
Here's how it breaks down. Your printer needs the RAM to render each page that it prints. When you send a 50kB Word file, the printer turns the information (depending on its internal logic) into some kind of graphic format, then throws all those millions of dots onto a page. One page of a Word document can end up being quite a few megs of information. Graphic files can take up even more room inside the printer, so they need more RAM. Sometimes just one very graphic intensive page can be over 50MB, and if your printer doesn't have enough memory to store all the information it needs to print that one page, it will just reject it I've seen this happen before on the printers in my old lab, and it's ridiculous when you're rejecting documents on a printer with 64MB of RAM because it can't render one page properly.
Queueing tons of documents- if you're in an office and you just print directly to the printer, the amount of RAM on board determines how many documents it can store in its own memory. If you have a separate computer serving information to the printer, then on board RAM doesn't really matter for document storage. The server keeps track of everything going to the printer and sends more information when needed.
By looking at what kind of network setup you have feeding your printer and what kind of jobs you typically print, you can spec out the amount of memory that you want to use. I always just recommend maxing out the memory banks on the printers I had to buy, but my area was printing constantly on multiple printers pushing more than 24ppm, and quite a bit of the jobs were very graphic intensive.
