Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!columbia!link.columbia.edu!yoram From: yoram@link.columbia.edu (Yoram Eisenstadter) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: Host software alternatives to PS engines? Message-ID: <5883@columbia.edu> Date: 16 Sep 88 14:37:49 GMT References: Sender: news@columbia.edu Reply-To: yoram@cs.columbia.edu (Yoram Eisenstadter) Distribution: na Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science Lines: 24 In article hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: >> buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, >>and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer... > >IBM has a Postscript implementation for their PC's that appears to do >conversion on the PC. They seem to use a barebones print engine, a >board that fits in the PC and generates the image, and software on the >PC that does the Postscript. An interesting approach to bringing down >the cost of Postscript printing. The innocuous-looking little board that goes along with the IBM Personal Pageprinter contains a 68000 processor and 2MB of memory. The Postscript interpreter runs on this processor, not on the PC (which I believe is used only for I/O). I don't see a big cost differential between putting the 68000 on an external board the way IBM does, and putting it inside the printer box the way Apple, for example, does. Cheers..Y Yoram Eisenstadter | ARPAnet yoram@cs.columbia.edu Columbia University | UUCP rutgers!columbia!garfield!yoram 450 Computer Science Bldg. | uunet!cs.columbia.edu!yoram