On Tue, 4 Oct 2011, Alex Freed wrote:
That's at least some of what Don Lancaster was doing with the Apple II and laser printer. I can't remember to what extent he was actually using it for printing, but he was showing off Postscript as a programming language. So for example, he wasn't making patterns and then printing them, he was showing off how to make the patterns on the printer, hand coding on the Apple II.And before I shoot my own foot off... I just read up that the Personal 300/LS, Select 300|310|360, Pro 600|630|640|810 and Color LaserWriter all supported serial ports...I guess I can be considered a resident expert as I used to work for Adobe Systems - a company that actually designed all the PostScript printers of the era.They all had a serial port. LocalTalk was based on a Zilog "SCC" chip that is a dual USART. One channel was plain old serial.Software is a different matter. Either you write some Apple 2 code to spit out PostScript of write some interpreter in PostScript on the printer itself, crazy as it sounds. Yes, PostScript is a full blown programming language :)
Of course, at least at one point, he had one of those laser printers with the hard drive attached, so the laser printer was like a full blown computer.
Michael
So the short answer is it can be done but not without writing code. > -Alex.