Re: Lanpress

[PB14@le.ac.uk (Phil Beesley)]

In article <69effm$9h3$1@news.injersey.com>, khorster@injersey.com (Karl 
Horster) wrote:

>         Where I work there are devices that hook to the network printers 
> called Lanpress, and they are made by Castelle.  The have a BNC connector 
> and an RJ45 for the network side, and then have a serial and parallel 
> port for the printer side.  I know nothing about them except they make 
> the printers work, and I don't know if they are bidirectional, or the 
> cost and so on, but they seem like it could be a way to hook an Apple // 
> up to ethernet, does anyone have more info on them?

A nice thought, but it wouldn't work. These boxes attach to dumb printers
and pretend to be a *print server* for whatever network system(s) you use.
The Lanpress or HP JetDirect or the Intel Whatever-it-is all have multiple
personalities so that they can be used with Unix, NetWare, Mac, NT systems
and a variety of ethernet protocols.

One plug-in box that *might* work is the Farallon Etherwave that plugs
into a Mac LocalTalk port to connect it to an ethernet network. These do
work on the Mac but are noticeably slower than a proper ethernet
interface. However you would need to write a driver for the device,
assuming you could get enough info on how it worked. 

Several companies also produced Mac ethernet adapters that plugged into
the SCSI connector that also might work on a IIGS. Again you'd need some
inside information on the device before you could even start to write a
driver.

-- 
Computer Officer -- Distributed Systems Support 
Computer Centre, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.