laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/13/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> Well, this morning I went to Businessland in Los Altos and wrote a personal check for $7000 for my very own Apple LaserWriter. Although I am a consultant for Adobe, and Adobe has plenty of LaserWriters, they are always busily using them and so I've had almost no first-hand experience with these beasts. I was willing to stake the $7K on the basis of what I knew about it, but it was definitely an act of faith to take the sum of money that was supposed to buy a replacement for my aging VW bus and squander it on a machine that fits in the trunk of a Toyota. My wife is more or less still speaking to me, O miracle of miracles. Maybe I'll let her print a few pages now and then. Naturally the very first thing I did with it was to take it apart and look inside. (Warranty? what warranty?). The logic board is mounted on top, inside a heavy sheet-metal cage. Disassembling the cage let me see the top of the logic board. If I remember the numbers correctly, it had 107 chips, of which 35 are SSI chips and the others are big chips of one kind or another. That's a pretty impressive ratio of big chips to little ones. There are 48 256K RAM chips, about 16 chips that look like big ROM or PLA's or something, a 68000 processor, a crystal with a frequency of something like 26.5MHz (I didn't write it down, but it was close to that), a few random SSI chips, and a whole lot of junk to keep the LaserWriter from jamming your television set. The man in Businessland didn't know much about the machine. He told me that I could use my ImageWriter cable to connect it to my Macintosh. That is true, but the Macintosh software doesn't know how to use the ImageWriter cable. A quick call to Bruce Horn confirmed my suspicions that indeed I was going to have to go back and buy 2 AppleTalk kits if I wanted to connect up to my Mac. I didn't have time to go back and buy 2 AppleTalk kits, so instead one of the eager and talented graduate students made up a cable to connect the LaserWriter to the modem port on the Mac, and we used MacTerminal to talk ASCII to it directly. For the record, that cable is just like an Mac modem cable, except that it has TxD and RxD (pins 2 and 3 on the DB25 connector) reversed. It definitely prints PostScript, and prints it beautifully. I spent the next half hour or so gleefully typing in little PostScript files that would do things like print my name diagonally in 600-point Times Roman and then put some light gray 48-point Helvetica on top of it. Boxes and arcs; things like that. It does what the manual says it does. In a couple of days I will report on my adventures in connecting it up to my Vax and trying to print real files on it. I just have to figure out how to walk a purchase order for a Transcript source license through the fearsome Stanford purchasing department so I can get a Transcript tape and run spoolers and (who, me?) TRoff and stuff. We have a program that converts Press files into PostScript files, so once I get the spooler working I will probably run the thing on the Ethernet as if it were a Dover. Brian Reid Stanford
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/14/85)
From: DonWinter.pasa@XEROX.ARPA Some folks are going to be rather surprised at the more than a factor of TEN reduction in speed when you make the Apple LaserWriter act like a Dover on the Ethernet!
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/15/85)
From: starkweather.pa@XEROX.ARPA Brian, are the Laser Writer machines readily available then? I am going to buy one too but thought that the line might be long. If it is not I will move towards getting one right away. By the way thanks for your excellent synopsis of Interpress/Postscript. Even though I have had several immersions in the local PARC environment (a la JaM etc.) I found your comparison very useful. Gary Starkweather
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/17/85)
From: allegra!packard!harvard!uwvax!wisc-stat!yandell@uw-beaver.arpa (Brian Yandell) Yesterday's Wall Street Journal indicated that the LaserWriters will be at distributors next week.