[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Mark J. Blair]

On Jan 11, 2014, at 12:30 , Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
> Anyone else remember how Don Lancaster used to fill column after column in Radio-Electronics magazine raving about all the cool things he could do with Postscript on his LaserWriter hooked up to his Apple 2.  His favorite saying was something about how PS was a general purpose programming language that just happened to be good at putting marks all over otherwise blank sheets of paper.

I don't recall that in particular, but I did always think it's pretty cool that you can plug a plain old dumb terminal into a Postscript printer (assuming the printer has an RS-232 serial port), and type in Postscript code to render stuff. Or to do any other arbitrary computing, for that matter!

When I first got my CNC milling machine, I didn't have any software for creating G-code to control it. I developed my own little Postscript-inspired language which I called PostMill, and wrote a program to turn PostMill into G-code for my milling machine. Instead of rendering marks onto a page, it generated G-code to move a cutter around using almost the same syntax as is used for line drawing in PostScript.


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/