laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/22/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Cascade> This is a field report on my experiences at connecting my new Apple LaserWriter to my VAX 750/4.2BSD system. The LaserWriter comes with a 9-pin AppleTalk connector and a 25-pin RS232 connector; it is an easy matter to set the selector switch to the RS232 position and then boot the machine. It plugs into a terminal line just fine. The first part was easy. Modify /etc/ttys to prevent getty monitoring of that line; then connect to the beast with kermit and start typing commands at it. Lo and behold, it prints pages. However, in that mode it is a very expensive typewriter rather than a very wonderful printer. Charlie Kim of Columbia U. (US.CCK@CU-20B.ARPA) sent me a couple of small programs that did a creditable job of being spooling filters and line printer emulators. Stuart Marks got them working for me, and everything was peachy. Charlie's programs don't have a lot of options and they don't do much with error recovery but they do work. It took us (Stuart and me) a while to get the tty line option bits right; for the record, the correct bits (courtesy of Andy Shore) are these: :br#9600:rw:fc#0000374:fs#0000003:xc#0:xs#0040040:mx#0:sf:\ fs == set flag bits == CBREAK|TANDEM fc == clear flag bits == EVENP|ODDP|RAW|CRMOD|ECHO|LCASE xs == set mode bits == LDECCTQ|LLITOUT Charlie Kim would probably send these programs to you, too. They're good, but they are just a quick hack. We lived with them for a few days, but I wanted troff support and plot(5) support and I wanted 2-column program listings and I wanted accounting and I wanted error recovery, and all those good things, so I bit the bullet and spent $2950 of Stanford money on a site-wide source license for Transcript. I'll describe my experiences with Transcript in a companion message to this one.