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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Field report: connecting Apple LaserWriter to Unix
Message-ID: <945@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 22-Mar-85 03:01:33 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.945
Posted: Fri Mar 22 03:01:33 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Mar-85 01:49:32 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 35

From: Brian Reid <reid@Cascade>

This is a field report on my experiences at connecting my new Apple
LaserWriter to my VAX 750/4.2BSD system. The LaserWriter comes with a
9-pin AppleTalk connector and a 25-pin RS232 connector; it is an easy
matter to set the selector switch to the RS232 position and then boot
the machine. It plugs into a terminal line just fine.

The first part was easy. Modify /etc/ttys to prevent getty monitoring
of that line; then connect to the beast with kermit and start typing
commands at it. Lo and behold, it prints pages. However, in that mode
it is a very expensive typewriter rather than a very wonderful printer.

Charlie Kim of Columbia U. (US.CCK@CU-20B.ARPA) sent me a couple of
small programs that did a creditable job of being spooling filters and
line printer emulators. Stuart Marks got them working for me, and
everything was peachy.

Charlie's programs don't have a lot of options and they don't
do much with error recovery but they do work. It took us (Stuart and
me) a while to get the tty line option bits right; for the record, the
correct bits (courtesy of Andy Shore) are these:
    :br#9600:rw:fc#0000374:fs#0000003:xc#0:xs#0040040:mx#0:sf:\
	fs == set flag bits	== CBREAK|TANDEM
	fc == clear flag bits	== EVENP|ODDP|RAW|CRMOD|ECHO|LCASE
	xs == set mode bits	== LDECCTQ|LLITOUT

Charlie Kim would probably send these programs to you, too. They're
good, but they are just a quick hack. We lived with them for a few
days, but I wanted troff support and plot(5) support and I wanted
2-column program listings and I wanted accounting and I wanted error
recovery, and all those good things, so I bit the bullet and spent
$2950 of Stanford money on a site-wide source license for Transcript.
I'll describe my experiences with Transcript in a companion message to
this one.