22 Apr
2016
22 Apr
'16
1:47 p.m.
On 2016-04-22 4:28 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote:
Yes, it had RS232 serial (and AppleTalk), like all the early PostScript
devices.
It wasn't _that_ fast, though: 12 MHz 68K running an interpreted
language (with no doubt native code for the graphics implementation;
perhaps that's where its reputation for speed came from, but only useful
for its actual purpose, printing :).
I suppose one could say that it was a little faster hardware-wise than
the Macs of 1985, but they were usually running native code, so the
comparison isn't very useful imho.
--Toby
I like the new types of peripherals but it makes
me a little
uncomfortable
knowing that e.g. in the case of the uIEC-SD for Commodores, the clock
speed of the peripheral is 16 to 20 times that of the original host
CPU. I
keep hatching little schemes of perhaps putting a tiny OS kernel in the
thing, but at that point *it* would become the computer and the 128 would
be just sort of sitting there. The same is true of the CosmosEx device
I've
been thinking of getting for my Atari STs; it has a Raspberry Pi inside.
I heard at the time, that the Apple Laserwriter was the "most powerful"
machine that they made, and that certain people were connecting
terminals to it and programming in Postscript. I did some trivial
programming in Postscript, but didn't have a Laserwriter. It was a
stack based language, with similarities to Forth. I suspect that the
"terminals" were actually terminal emulation in whichever machines were
currently connected anyway.
I made a company logo that was outline letters with a fill of lines
radiating from a point (think about Moire pattern artifacts when pushing
the resolution limits). Then I found that the "Freedom Of Press"
Postscript emulation of the commercial large format printer was too
slow, and did not have a large enough stack space. (whilst other
deadlines were looming).