[zdw]

There was a time when the fastest 68k processor Apple shipped was in the LaserWriter (12MHz instead of 8Mhz in the Mac).

I seem to recall a story of someone internal to Apple figuring out how to run a compiler or other batch processing system on the LaserWriter as a faster quasi-coprocessor attached to a Mac.

[fsflyer]

I remember that time. I was taking a graduate level intro to graphics class and we had an assignment to write a ray-tracer and turn in a printout of the final image along with a printout of the source code. The instructor allowed any programming language, so I used a different one for each assignment.

For the ray tracing assignment I used postscript, the PS image operator calls a function to return each sample in the image. The transform matrix made scaling the image easy.

My code was two pages long, up from one page because of the many comments. I think the next shortest was 15 pages. It also ran faster than most others because of the faster processor.

[jrdres]

Don Lancaster (outside of Apple) did that. In fact, he ignored the Mac and connected a LaserWriter directly to his Apple II, and programmed in straight PostScript. Used that language the rest of his life. All the PDFs on his site were hand-crafted.

[epcoa]

Oh I knew that was coming. This interesting but ancient piece of trivia just illustrates something about how slow micros were back then. It’s not like printer don’t have more and multiple CPUs today. Not like whatever poorly written outsourced to India “managed” shit and other features are going to run on a potato. Whatever is driving the color touch LCD on even the Walmart econoshit is many times more powerful then that 12 MHz 68k.

Still have no idea what the GPs point was. You can just as easily run a raster on the host, if it has bugs it has bugs, where it lives doesn’t matter.

Further rosetinting is of course that LaserWriter was $20k and it’d be a decade plus before a monochrome dropped under 1. I’m gonna guess the Canon with the shitty drivers is 10x cheaper and faster.

[bombcar]

The amount of data transfer for 300x300 DPI full page images is high even now, most printers still render fonts and such internally.

[epcoa]

It really isn't that much though. A 1200x1200 DPI monochrome image on Letter size (not even considering margins) paper is on the order of 16 MiB uncompressed. And bitmaps of text and line art compress down heavily (and you can use a bitmap atlas or prerendered bitmap font technique as well). It’s also usually easier to upgrade RAM in a printer than a crappy firmware.

> most printers still render fonts and such internally.

Many printers have some scalable font rendering capability, but it is often not usable in practice for high fidelity. You absolutely can raster on the host to either a bitmap font, or make use of the PDL's native compression. Most lower end printers (which is pretty much the bulk of what is sold) do not have the capability to render arbitrary TrueType fonts, for instance. A consumer/SOHO level Canon laser using UFRII is going to rely on the host for rastering arbitrary fonts.