LaserWriter Plus

On Apr 10, 2005 10:49 AM, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote: The original Apple LaserWriter had a 12MHz 68000, 1MB of RAM and 1.5MB of ROM (the ROM amount _might_ be for the Plus... but it's on that order)... remarkedly more powerful than the Mac Plus one often found attached to them... the $5000 price tag also explained why Apple was big on networked printers early on. It was unrealistic to expect that a company would buy one printer per user. The C-64 and the 1541 were more expectedly matched (both 1MHz 6502-family processors, more RAM in the C-64...), but the point is well taken. In the case of the PET and the 2040/3040/4040 drives, there were _two_ 6502-family CPUs in the drive, and one in the main computer, one of the reasons the dual disk drive cost twice as much as the computer it was attached to. -ethan ObFolklore... Don Lancaster used to refer to his Apple LW as his "PostScript Computer". He described sitting at it with a terminal and interactively entering PS programs to produce a variety of complicated outputs. I used that as an inspiration when I devised the minimal PS to print aligned text on SDLT paperboard label inserts, a year ago. Following his lead, I turned my project from an OpenOffice document tweakfest into a genuine programming exercise.