gt0831c@prism.gatech.EDU (William Moss) (03/01/91)
This is a LONG SHOT, but any help would be appreciated...
The company I am co-oping for will be trying to computerize it's Florida
offices. They haven't bought anything yet, and would like to buy Mac's
But they need some hardware and communications which PC's support but
Mac support is questionable.
BIG REQUIREMENT:
Is there a way to allow multiple macs to be connected to an HP Plotter?
On the PC they would use a Serial A/B/C switch to choose which user
has control of the printer. I suppose these types of switches exist for
the mac. But the serial ports being somewhat finicky I just
wondered if they exist and are there caveats about their use.
I also thought of setting up an Appletalk network and using a Shiva
NetSerial device to drive the plotter. This is questionable. In
addition to normal mac usage, they need to use the plotter over
SoftPC to obtain output from several PC fortran programs. Since
SoftPC provides no network emulation (except possibly simple
printing from the chooser), I donUt know if this would work.
Is there a program on the mac that can send DOS generated HPGL
files to a plotter?
The reason an Appletalk shared serial device looks attractive is because
we also want to network a 2400 baud modem, Laserprinter, and a dot
matrix printer. Any suggestions for the modem or dot matrix printer?
These would be 4 Mac IIciUs with Nubus connections to an IBM AS/400.
Please respond quickly.
Thanks,
wMoss
William Moss
gt0831c@prism.gatech.edu