Timeline for How did early laser printers get by with so little memory?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
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| Nov 25, 2022 at 20:36 | comment | added | Harper - Reinstate Monica | @davidbak I suspect our Laserjet III's would still be running if we still had them lol. Also I don't remember mentioning Don Lancaster so it's a happy sound to hear that name out of the blue. /fistbump to a fellow fan! | |
| Nov 25, 2022 at 14:22 | comment | added | davidbak | I had the Postscript cartridge (and a few font cartridges) for my LJIII. (Which by the way was a tank and lasted a long long long time.) It was fun, and in addition to printing the usual stuff I played with a lot of Don Lancaster's really neat and advanced postscript direct-programming stuff | |
| Apr 17, 2021 at 20:26 | history | edited | Harper - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 17, 2021 at 20:19 | history | edited | Harper - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 17, 2021 at 20:15 | comment | added | Harper - Reinstate Monica | @wrosecrans I would say that if you failed to grasp that PostScript is a non-starter on these early printers, then my answer has failed to educate you. Edited. Perhaps you are making a false equivalence between PCL and PostScript, they were not competitor variants of the same thing like "Coke and Pepsi". More like Coke vs '80 Chateau Margaux. | |
| Apr 17, 2021 at 20:00 | history | edited | Harper - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 17, 2021 at 19:21 | comment | added | wrosecrans | My understanding of the original question was more about how the printer actually renders languages like PCL and PostScript without a full page frame buffer. That you couldn't send a large bitmap to early printers is sort of side stepping the question of what happens inside the printer. The printer can't compute unbounded amounts of PCL on the fly either. | |
| Apr 15, 2021 at 2:15 | comment | added | David42 | I remember driving the HP LaserJet IID with Ghostscript at 300 DPI. Had to install an addon RAM card to do that. | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 21:40 | comment | added | Harper - Reinstate Monica | @supercat I've done that, mainly for mail merges when I have complex graphics on the same page as the mail-merged address data. Either due to software limits (PageMaker didn't do mail merge) or to avoid a time-consuming rasterization per page. But I wouldn't count on registration being any finer than 1/4". | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 21:22 | comment | added | Harper - Reinstate Monica | @Raffzahn Good point. | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 21:21 | history | edited | Harper - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2021 at 21:11 | history | edited | Harper - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2021 at 20:31 | comment | added | supercat | @Raffzahn: I wonder if the page-to-page alignment would have been adequate to allow one to produce something like a newsletter page by feeding the paper through the printer multiple times, e.g. once for the banner headline and footer, once for the left column, and once for the right column? | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 20:20 | comment | added | Raffzahn | Ermmm ... no, but. Of course one could send bitmap. With 75 DPI it was even enough for a whole page and still comparable to existing DMP. It was as well possible to send a 300 DPI, except in this cases only rather small images would work. Oh, and you should put that paragraph about rasterisation time for postscript in BLINK and MARQUE tags. It was an extreme disappointment when hit first - then again, a friend made a business out of high sped upgrades for laser printers :) | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 16:39 | history | answered | Harper - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 |