[rescue] the folly of getting a sparcprinter 1 running fro scratch

[john]

Hi Chase,

You need the S-Bus card, and a cable, and NewsPrint and a password and a Sparcstation which will run SunOS 4.1.3 or 4.1.4 or onje of the very early Solarises.

The first NewsPrint didn't require a password but was on a QiC tape.  I suspect that the drive belts on all of QIC tapes have now deformed so as to make these tapes unusable.  I have a CD for the second version, the passworded one.  I can't remember if the password was tied to the hostid. I think it was but you can always spoof a hostid if necessary.

I think but am not sure that it will print courier at 11 points without the NewsPrint, but not much more.

If I get my ghostscript installation revived I'll share it with you.  Figure on spending at least a person/week on it if you're fairly sharp with Berkely or SunOS 4.1.3/4.

You need to keep a clear head.  You can buy  a Canon laser printer for around $100 which pretty much does everything the SPARC printer does, and you don't need to keep a sparcstation running to do the rasterizing.

let me know how this looks to you.

john






Message: 1
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2019 18:05:54 +0000 (UTC)
From: Chase Rayfield<cusbrar2 at yahoo.com>
To:rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: [rescue] Fwd: scsi2sd and strong coffee
Message-ID:<295845003.708891.1567274754859 at mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

I have a SparcPrinterB  intend to get working at some point It might have been
that one on ebay actually... so anything you document about how to get it
working again would probably be helpful. I don't have it setup at the moment.

Chase