[HECnet] Potentially stupid printer question...

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2011-10-11 17.16, Mark Wickens wrote:
I've been offered a very nice printer for the price of shipping. It's a
centronics based printer. I currently have an LA75 hooked up to a
DECserver 90M. Obviously MMJ/serial connection.

My question is - does OpenVMS support parallel printers? Would it be a
lot of work getting it to work natively without having to include
another box in the mix (ie, a linux box).

My brain has been trampled on with work today, something may come to me
yet...

Actually having said that, I guess a Centronics/Network interface would
do the trick at the very least.

The answer is yes, though.
But only for machines that actually have hardware parallel ports, such as Unibus machines with a LP11, or Q-bus machines with a LPV11.
No pizza-box VAXen, or more modern big models have parallel ports as far as I can remember.
(Of course I can be wrong...)

But even if you discover that such an interface exist, you also need to locate one to add to your machine in order to do this.

By the way, the LP11 interface is almost identical to Centronics. It's one signal (if I remember right), which have inverted levels, but otherwise it works just fine.

If you have a parallel interface, VMS makes it available as a device driver. The normal spooler tasks can make use of that interface just as well as a serial port. Makes no difference from the spooler task point of view. It's just an interface on which you send bytes.

	Johnny