woody@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Woody Baker @ Eagle Signal) (10/03/90)
If any of you have taken a look at Don Lancasters latest column, he has documented a way to allow an external scsi bus computer to access the hard disk in the laserwriters that have hard disks. It is sort of a kludge but it works. He points out some directions that need investigation. The apparently simplest way to do this, (and it is a bit of a kludge) is to initialize your hard disk, and before doing anything else, set up a couple of huge files. these will apparently be contiguous files, and thier addresses are known. (he gives the block numbers in his article) Then you can use direct block reads and writes to put data into the file on the hard disk over the scsi port at some absolutly incredible speed. If you wish to save the file elsewhere, you can apparently copy it to somewhere else on the hard disk. He uses this to dump massive precompiled documents (precompiled in the sense of something like distillary) to the printer, so that he can do his book on demand printing. He also says that you can back your hard disk up via this technique. Any comments on an easier way to do it? Cheers Woody
ralerche@lindy.stanford.edu (Robert A. Lerche) (10/04/90)
Ahhhh, the PostScript world rediscovers shared DASD. Now all we need are Reserve/Release CCW's and VTOC's.