laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/20/85)
From: bader@cmu-psy-b (miles bader) I am sending this through a friend, and am personally unable to easily read this board. Replies can be sent to the sender of this message, or to AD0R@cmu-cc-tb. I also should be able to hear of replies posted through my friend. I an the entertainment editor for our campus (CMU) newspaper, The Tartan. We several months ago acquired a Compugrapics MCS10 dedicated typesetter system and a Compugraphics 8400 phototypesetter hooked to it. The system also includes the preview option, which gives a variably good screen preview of a typesetting job. This system was purchased last semester, and when i arrived on the scene this semester, i found that no one involved had a real idea of the machine from the computer aspect. Now my reason for submitting this. We currently run the system off of a compugraphics supplied single floppy drive, which i find holds an amusing 92k formatted. This is enough to allow 16 simultaneous fonts. We now want to go beyond this number, and this requires a hard drive. After finding CG's hard drive to be rather expensive, and with my impressions of CG's hardware, I would like to find a third-party hard drive that we can buy that is @i(of course) compatible with the system as it now stands. I am also interested in a second floppy drive for the system. Does anyone know if it is possible to obtain a floppy for a CG system that has a greater capacity, or even a second 92 k drive? Another quest of mine is to interface the system with the rest of the digital world. Compugraphics sells an (to use their own words) "interface" that would supposedly allow us to do terminal emulation and file transfer with our dec 20's. They also tell us that this costs $5000. I think that figure might be just a little inflated. The alternative that seems most useful to me is to accomplish a connection between the system and an IBM PC. The manual (hideously incomplete) for the phototypesetter itself gives the protocol for incoming data to the typesetter, but nothing is mentioned anywhere that i can find about the protocol of the front end system. It seems likely to me that it would be possible to have the PC emulate a terminal attached to the system and thus accomplish data transfer as normal input at a higher speed. Can someone tell me if this is possible, and if it is, any technical details (such as the protocol and connections) that you have discovered? Compugraphics is, of course, of little help in my inquiry. I would appreciate any help or advice anyone could offer me on this subject. Replies can be sent to me, AD0R@cmu-cc-tb, to my friend, BADER@cmu-psy-a, or posted, but since i do not have arpa access myself, the former is preferable. thank you.