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From: jness@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU (Joel Ness)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Mac Serial Drivers
Message-ID: <1138@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU>
Date: 5 Jul 89 19:45:35 GMT
Reply-To: jness@ub.d.umn.edu.UUCP (Joel Ness)
Organization: University of Minnesota, Duluth
Lines: 37

I have a department here which is currently sharing a LaserWriter among
a number of IBM PCs by way of a switch box (they are using the
PostScript capabilities of the printer with WP and Ventura).
A few faculty members now have Macs and want to also use the LaserWriter.
They presently have to do some replugging in and reconfiguring the
LaserWriter to do this (making it a pain and using up EPROM rewrites). 

Of course the obvious solution which we are still pushing is to buy PC
AppleTalk cards and network the department. We still may succeed at
convincing them to do this but in the mean time they are trying to find
a "minimal-funding" solution.

I'd appreciate any experiences/suggestions/ideas as to:

    1. Serial drivers. I'm assuming we'd need a way of sending
Postscript out a serial port without having to encode it in AppleTalk
packets. Is that correct? What sort of software might do this?

    2. Hardware connections. Would some sort of Mac serial to 25-pin
cable work here - assuming that the proper sort of information was
coming out of the serial port? What would the wiring diagram be for
this?

    3. Anything else that would make the operation more difficult or
impossible.

I'm hoping that there is either an easy way to do this, or no way at
all. Then I can either get them going quickly until they can afford an
AppleTalk network, or just tell them to find the money in the budget
somehow.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 
Joel Ness			       		INTERNET: jness@ub.d.umn.edu
Information Services		        	BITNET:  JNESS@UMNDUL
University of Minnesota, Duluth