glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) (10/16/90)
Some time ago someone asked about the BridgePort box from Extended Systems.
The box is designed to let you connect a PostScript printer both to a Mac
appletalk network and to a PC via the serial port. The box is only about
$500, and it looked like a good cheap way to put a NeXT box onto an
appletalk network. Extended Systems is in Boise, Idaho.
Well, it doesn't work.
Basically the problem is that the box doesn't provide a transparent data
path to the printer, it tries to "emulate" a printer. In particular, it
answers all the little queries that the Macintosh printer driver sends
down to the printer, like "what fonts do you have?" (the question is phrased
in PostScript, of course, but the box doesn't really understand the code,
it just knows that the question is coming, because it always does).
The serial port works the same way. It talks to the host computer and
apparently pretends to be a PostScript printer in a way that will fool
many popular PC drivers. However, the NeXT box needs to talk directly
to the printer, get status information, retrieve page counts, etc. It
just doesn't work, and unless they modify the box so that you get a
straight-through bi-directional data path across the serial line, it
probably will never work.
I had to actually buy one and spend time fooling with it to discover
this, and later confirmed it with their technical support people. They
do have a money-back guarantee, which I'm still waiting to receive.
In fairness, their box is not advertised to work on the NeXT box, it
is advertised to work with Macs and PCs, and I'm sure it does a fine job.
The company has a pretty good reputation. It just didn't happen to work
with the NeXT. You'd think a serial connection was a serial connection,
but there's all that helpful software in between....
I hope this helps somebody out there.
Glenn
--
Glenn Reid RightBrain Software
glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us PostScript/NeXT developers
..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn 415-851-1785