cctech Digest, Vol 39, Issue 13

[Roger Holmes]

On 8 Nov, 2006, at 19:38, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote:

>
> Yes, that is infact, the Apple Dot Matrix Printer (aka ADMP) which is
> identical to the ImageWriter, except that it works over a VIA 6522
> parallel port instead of the serial port that the ImageWriter uses.
> They are all versions of the C. Itoh 8510.  I'm not familiar with the
> DEC LA50, but it's very likely that, it too, is a C. Itoh.

My brother has a couple of these, I had both connected up to an  
Apple ///,
which acted as a cash register in my father's ironmongery shop. One was
for printing customer receipts and one for printing bar code labels.
The computer had an old till drawer attached and a one bit output from
the Apple /// operated a solenoid to open the drawer. There was a bar
code reader for the Apple ][ which I reverse engineered the software
for to made it work on the Apple ///, it just had a one bit input and
lots of clever timing code, interrupt driven on my version if I remember
correctly. I translated the whole lot for Lisa (while had one or two  
parallel
cards), and the software was definitely interrupt driven there.

>
> The Inkjet printer for the Lisa is the Canon PJ 1080A.  I wish I had
> some real docs for this printer, but I don't.

I had one of these too but it seems I put the manual back in the box
with the printer, which has of course been chucked. Nearly all the other
printers and plotters I've had on loan in the 80s and 90s (for writing
drivers for) I managed to hang on to the manuals, but the Cannon
(which we had to buy) is not with them.



> Lisa's LisaDraw routines
> (later rewritten in 68000 assembly and ported to the Mac and  
> renamed as
> QuickDraw) do support color,

I am fairly sure it was called QuickDraw on the Lisa as well. I think  
I still have two
really thick binders for the Lisa programming environment somewhere.  
I remember
writing my own code to do pull down menus in QuickDraw, CopyBits-ing  
the pixels
the menu was going to cover up to an offscreen buffer, bringing up  
the menu,
highlighting the items as the cursor went over them and reinstating  
the pixels
after the cursor was released. Why Apple did not make these routines  
available
I don't know. I chucked a lot of code away when we moved over to  
Macintosh.
Most of the early Mac data structures were handle based but QuickDraw's
GrafPorts remained pointer based right through to core graphics and  
Cocoa.

> although its display is 1 bit black and white,
> so, if you print a graphic that has color on this printer, you'll  
> get color.
>  I believe these were 16 colors, so 4 bit.

There were just eight predefined colour names, and these mapped onto
constants which were masks in both RGB and CMYK colour spaces.
You could assign the foreground(paint,fill etc) or background (erase)  
patterns
to any one of the eight colours.


>
> There was also a Daisywheel printer for the Lisa too, which was very
> interesting, since it supposedly could also print graphics too  
> according
> to the advertisements.  I can imagine that it must have used a single
> period character to poke dots, so it must have been super slow.  I
> couldn't find any real docs for it however.
>

Not practical for graphics. I remember seeing a daisywheel doing inverse
text, bashing away with the vertical bar and then using the erase  
part of
the ribbon to print the white text.