laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/18/86)
Next week I have been volunteered to go to a friend;'s office and take their HP laser printer off of their Commodore 64 (I'm not kidding) and put it on their Altos, so that the y don't have to have all their word-processing output going to a cheap dot-matrix printer. Somebody there fgot this great idea-- let's use the laser printer on the high-volume wp systems, and let the Commodore hacker read listings on a dot matrix. Would you believe it has taken them 18 months to reach this conclusion?! Anyway, iI don't know what mdodel printer it is (he says it's an 'early' model, implying pre-LaserJet, and that the y paid $2,000-$3,000 for it. They might have the manual somewhere...). Does anyone have any hints or aknown strangeness I should watch out for? Thanks!
laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/19/86)
(I would have preferred to answer this by private mail, but the Berkeley
laser-lovers gateway skillfully deleted the original sender's address...
Until something is done about this, signing submissions might be a good
idea if you want private replies.)
[[Editor's note: This has been reported to Berkeley already once or
twice. I'll mention it to them again. --Rick ]]
If the HP printer cost $2-3k, it probably is a LaserJet, perhaps by another
name. The only pre-LaserJet HP laser printers were big expensive ones.
The major problem likely to arise in getting a LaserJet onto an Altos (or
most any Unix system) is getting an 8-bit output path that respects XON/XOFF
flow control. On SysV it can be done straightforwardly, barring problems
with stupid "smart" hardware. On x.yBSD there is a bit that claims to do
the right thing, but there is some problem about getting it set properly
(need to ioctl twice? I forget...). On V7-derived systems, you're in
trouble unless you have sources and can tinker with the terminal driver.
The LaserJet will also do hardware handshaking, although this was not
documented in early manuals. (It is documented in newer ones -- the
LaserJet manual has been through *at least* two substantial revisions.
The most modern edition of the manual is two parts, the Operator's
Reference Manual, 02686-90914, and the Technical Reference Manual,
02686-90915; you might want to order these from HP. You need both.)
The printer will drop DTR to say "stop"; you will need a cable that runs
this line to the right pin on your computer, perhaps CTS or DSR. And you'll
need a system that pays attention to such flow control, which some don't.
Note that running *both* hardware and XON/XOFF handshaking probably is
not going to work!
The early LaserJet manuals also did not document how to change the baud
rate. Again, getting new manuals is the simplest answer to this. (If
desperate, send me mail.) You're likely to find it set for 9600 baud if
the manual is old enough not to describe how to change it, since that's
the factory default. One stop bit, no parity.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henrylaser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/20/86)
> ... I have been volunteered to go to a friend;'s office and take their > HP laser printer off of their Commodore 64 (I'm not kidding) and put it on > their Altos. ... > > Does anyone have any hints or a known strangeness I should watch out for? The Altos does not respond to XON/XOFF fast enough when it is transferring data at high baud rates. If you can get the printer to raise DTR when it is ready to accept characters and drop DTR when it is busy, you should have no problems. Andy Behrens {astrovax,decvax,cornell,ihnp4,linus,harvard}!dartvax!andyb.UUCP andyb@dartmouth.CSNET andyb%dartmouth@csnet-relay.ARPA
laser-lovers@ucbvax.berkeley.edu.UUCP (01/23/86)
Yes, the most difficult problem for me was that a line feed does not mean a LF-CR to the printer. I solved the problem with a termcap entry (used by the word processor). I forget how I solved it for the print command. Sorry if this arrives too late. Rick McLean
laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/26/86)
> Yes, the most difficult problem for me was that a line feed does > not mean a LF-CR to the printer... If you check the LaserJet manual "Line Termination" section, you will find out that \033&k2G fixes that. By default the LaserJet thinks that CR is CR, LF is LF, and FF is FF, but that behavior can be changed somewhat. In particular, mode setting 2 leaves CR alone but supplies an implicit CR for both LF and FF. This is quite helpful, since the terminal driver can't do the translation without potentially fouling up graphics data. Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry