🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <gWU7hby00WE38Vw0EO@andrew.cmu.edu> tm2f+@andrew.cmu.edu (Terence David Murphy) writes:
>In article <7644@dhw68k.cts.com>, Roger L. Long (bytebug) writes:

... 

>
>My suggestion for supplying printer drivers is based on price, which fals into
>the same situation as above.  I could get a serial Okidata printer for about
>half the price of an Imagewriter //, but since Apple doesn't supply printer
>drivers, they are hard to find.  People buying a first computer are not going
>to know about these things (and I doubt Apple dealers would mention it to
>them), thus they're looking at $500 for a printer instead of $250-$300. It all
>falls into the same situation.
>
>Terence Murphy
>Note: Since I'm leaving school in two days, I won't be reachable electronicaly
>and also won't be contributing to this discussion anymore (I can hear the
>cheers already).  But don't stop on my account.
>address via US Mail:
>2700 Evans Dale Cir
>Atlanta GA  30340  USA


I think that AppleUs actions in this respect go somewhat deeper than a rather
shallow attempt to make the user by only their printer. Apple has always been
very concerned with maintaining control of the apparent quality of the Mac and
has tried to avoid supporting any feature that could be misused to make the 
machine look bad.  For instance, when you will notice that they refuse to 
release anything like the Kolor cdev for the Mac II.  My understanding is that
they are afraid that people will pick ugly, amateurish, and garrish color 
combinations that will make the Mac II look bad to others.  I suspect that
if they do ever release such a cdev it will have only hard-wired sets of colors

Now I have worked with various drivers for lower-end printers, such ast epstart
and toshstart (epson and toshiba drivers from softstyle) and the grappler 8-
pin printer interface.  Also, I have used the Seikosha 1000ap.  While all of
these solutions "worked"  they all produced uniformly poor results because
the underlying printers had not been optimized for graphics output, in the way
that the imagewriter is.

You've seen apple's ads for the mac.  They expect the mac's real spread to be
by having current users impress others with the Mac's capabilities.  Output
from any of the alternative solutions above would fail horribly to impress.

In support of this idea you will also note that there is no problem hooking up 
third party PostScript printers.  Apple has put no roadblocks in your way be-
cause they no the output will be up to their standards.

Theses are just my thoughts and opinions.  No one else cares...

(Note:  Ill be away the next two weeks, so flame all you want, the notes
should expire before I can read them..  -:)


-------------------------

Josh Hodas    (hodas@eniac.seas.upenn.edu)
4223 Pine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

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