• Rainy Wednesday Afternoon

    From Spectre@21:3/101 to Nobody on Wed Apr 29 21:10:00 2020
    I got no time for worries...

    Well its a suitably miserable kind of day here... a spot of sun once or twice ìand rain, rain, rain. Did I mention my pickup from the long shop yesterday? ìMY memory is attrocious sometimes...

    I've been poking about in serial land, as there was a Mac printer/serial in ìthere. According to my serial tester it looks normal... however into my null ìmodem I'm only getting one way communication meaning the Apple end is missing ìhandshaking again. Still if I can beat it into submission it should be ìbetter than my rather sad current home made cable. Lacking anything else I ìused cat5 for it, it doesn't bend very well :/

    I discovered after about 15 minutes behind the soldering iron, I was having ìtrouble focusing on what was going on.. I have some floaties going on in my ìeyes, but I seem to have some that aren't really visible but make everything ìa bit fuzzy at certain focal lengths. Reading glasses helped immensely, I ìcan see they're going to become my close friend going forward from here.

    There were also a couple of SCSI drives, and some other assorted bit and ìpieces. 56Kflex modem if anyones interested in it, no power supply and its ìan AC job. Time for a break... eyes aren't all that happy with me... and ìgoing to go and shut them. Enjoy.

    Spec


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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Spectre on Wed Apr 29 11:51:00 2020
    Spectre wrote to Nobody <=-

    I've been poking about in serial land, as there was a Mac
    printer/serial in ìthere. According to my serial tester it looks
    normal... however into my null ìmodem I'm only getting one way communication meaning the Apple end is missing handshaking again.

    Oh, that sounds familiar. I spent the '90s scrounging cast-off hardware from my job, and I ended up picking up an Apple Laserwriter for my all-
    DOS/Windows home. Realized I could just send postscript to it and change
    the header page, print normally, etc - but do remember something wonky about the serial comms with it.

    I ended up having to send data to it at 9600 baud, which took forever. I
    could go into the other room and when the lights flickered, I knew it was printing!


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  • From Spectre@21:3/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri May 1 15:51:00 2020
    Oh, that sounds familiar. I spent the '90s scrounging cast-off
    hardware from my job, and I ended up picking up an Apple Laserwriter
    for my all- DOS/Windows home. Realized I could just send postscript

    Ahhh droool, back then we'd have nearly sold our cardboard box for a ìlaserwriter. I actually can't remember what we had, might have been an HP ìLaserjet in the end.

    Fastest way to talk to a laserwriter was AppleTalk.. second was serial, ìpretty
    much the only alternative... 9600 I think is its default speed... not ì100% sure though, its definately the speed the ImageWriter runs at. And yes ìthey do weird DSR handshaking not RTS/CTS

    Spec


    --- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
    * Origin: (21:3/101)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Spectre on Fri May 1 18:37:00 2020
    Spectre wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Ahhh droool, back then we'd have nearly sold our cardboard box for a ìlaserwriter. I actually can't remember what we had, might have been
    an HP Laserjet in the end.

    Ironically, they probably used the same Canon engine on the inside. I ended
    up getting one of those desktop Canon Laserjets - a IIp? with the same
    engine, a bigger paper tray and a parallel port for $35, and loved that
    thing to death.

    Fastest way to talk to a laserwriter was AppleTalk.. second was serial, ìpretty much the only alternative... 9600 I think is its default
    speed... not ì100% sure though, its definately the speed the
    ImageWriter runs at. And yes ìthey do weird DSR handshaking not
    RTS/CTS

    Those were the days - we ran Farallon PhoneTalk to our printers, and to a
    sort of star controller. The laserwriters, some of the Macs and anyone who
    had a Newton ran over Phonetalk, and when someone raised my ire, I'd put
    them on the phonetalk segment with all of the printers. :)


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