cctech Digest, Vol 39, Issue 13

On 8 Nov, 2006, at 19:38, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote: My brother has a couple of these, I had both connected up to an Apple ///, which acted as a cash register in my father's ironmongery shop. One was for printing customer receipts and one for printing bar code labels. The computer had an old till drawer attached and a one bit output from the Apple /// operated a solenoid to open the drawer. There was a bar code reader for the Apple ][ which I reverse engineered the software for to made it work on the Apple ///, it just had a one bit input and lots of clever timing code, interrupt driven on my version if I remember correctly. I translated the whole lot for Lisa (while had one or two parallel cards), and the software was definitely interrupt driven there. I had one of these too but it seems I put the manual back in the box with the printer, which has of course been chucked. Nearly all the other printers and plotters I've had on loan in the 80s and 90s (for writing drivers for) I managed to hang on to the manuals, but the Cannon (which we had to buy) is not with them. I am fairly sure it was called QuickDraw on the Lisa as well. I think I still have two really thick binders for the Lisa programming environment somewhere. I remember writing my own code to do pull down menus in QuickDraw, CopyBits-ing the pixels the menu was going to cover up to an offscreen buffer, bringing up the menu, highlighting the items as the cursor went over them and reinstating the pixels after the cursor was released. Why Apple did not make these routines available I don't know. I chucked a lot of code away when we moved over to Macintosh. Most of the early Mac data structures were handle based but QuickDraw's GrafPorts remained pointer based right through to core graphics and Cocoa. There were just eight predefined colour names, and these mapped onto constants which were masks in both RGB and CMYK colour spaces. You could assign the foreground(paint,fill etc) or background (erase) patterns to any one of the eight colours. Not practical for graphics. I remember seeing a daisywheel doing inverse text, bashing away with the vertical bar and then using the erase part of the ribbon to print the white text.