ye@henri.ucsb.edu (Hong Ye) (01/09/91)
Thanks to everyone who responded to my posting. Here is a brief summary. Floppy Drive: (1) The drive can read Mac 1.44Mb floppies. But someone has to come up with the software to handle Mac file system. (2) There are third-party floppy drive vendors that have Mac-compatible products. (3) 20Mb+ floppy drives should hit the market pretty soon. Laser Printer: NeXT has presumably opened up the printing architecture with 2.0. With an approriate printer driver, your NeXT machine should be able to support any printer. Now, any volunteer to write a driver for LaserJet? David
datran2 (01/09/91)
In article <8033@hub.ucsb.edu> ye@henri.ucsb.edu (Hong Ye) writes: >Laser Printer: > NeXT has presumably opened up the printing architecture with 2.0. > With an approriate printer driver, your NeXT machine should be > able to support any printer. Now, any volunteer to write a driver > for LaserJet? This is certainly do-able. In fact Data Transforms has been writing and selling printer drivers for bitmap printers for 10 years now. (We don't all have the luxury of institutional support) I do have one observation about this. The bitblasting printer port that connects to the NeXT printer operates at speeds far exceeding those supported by an RS232 laser printer. A full page bitmap at 300dpi is 7,560,000 bits. This a little more than 13 minutes per page at 9600 baud. Printers capable of 38.4kbaud will be able to get this down to a little over 3 minutes per page. Thats a long wait. After you've waited a half hour to get a 10 page document, the price of the NeXT printer doesn't look so bad. Steve -- #====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====# # Steve Boker # "Badgers, we don't have no stinking badgers" # # datran2!smb@csn.org # -from Treasure of the Sierra Madre Zoo # #====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#