Materiel and graft 4400

in fact, 6670 could be considered a (ibm) copier3 with computer interface. it did inherit "duplex" (being able to print on both sides) from copier3. 6670 formater started out being a flavor of (cms) script.

some number of people at sjr worked on sherpa enhancement to 6670 and then later, adding postscript support to sherpa (at least one of the people on the project, left and went to adobe).

note on adobe postscript

from long ago and far away ...

To: somebody at boulder CC: wheeler Lynn Wheeler forwarded me your mail about the Boulder satelite link. We have a joint project between two departments here in San Jose Research which is building a 6670 laser printer-copier-scanner. I should rather say that we are adding a scanner to the Boulder built 6670 laser printer-copier. My involvement is that we have built an APA (all points addressable) control unit for the 6670 for printing arbitrarily complex pages. We call it SHERPA. In fact, we installed a copy of our controller in Boulder in December. It has a 1M byte storage that hold a complete page image for printing. It is serialized and sent to the 6670 at a 10Mhz data rate (the 6670 laser speed). When we were designing the printer we also made allowances for the hardware to run "backward", taking a 10Mhz signal and filling the page image storage. Another group headed by zzzzz San Jose Research, has modified a 6670 to allow the laser to scan the toned photoconductor drum. We can dump the image into our full page bit image storage. One experiment that could be done with this high-speed scanner is to use it as a "remote copier". One could put one on each end of a high-speed data link and scan on one machine, transmit to the other and print on it. It is conceivable that this could be done at 35 pages-minute. We currently have a 56KB link between our SHERPA control unit and our 3033 host. On that bisync link it takes us 2 minutes to transmit a full page (uncompressed) bit image of a page. While that is not the mode for which we designed SHERPA it none-the-less supports it. We designed it to behave more like a photocomposer, taking coded character information with font selections and variable (flexible) spacing. The SHERPA also supports including images with the printed text and, in fact, the images can be as large as the whole page, providing the facimile like capability. What I would envision is encoding the scanned image inside the SHERPA, itself, to reduce the data from roughly 670,000 bytes-page to maybe 100,000 bytes. These would be sent to the 3033 host to be transmitted to the remote site. There the process would be reversed to form the printed image. Since we already have a SHERPA in Boulder and in fact are modifying a second 6670 for the manager of Boulder printer products, zzzzzzz, for Boulder experimentation, it would be the ideal set up for a high-speed link to demonstrate such a system. I would envision a link from host VM to VM. If it were 56KB and we could get a compression ratio of 4 to 1 or better with a simple algorithm, we could send about 2 pages-minute. One could possibly do much better. I am typing this at home just before bedtime so am not too sure if it is very easy to read, but will send it on anyway. If you would like to discuss this further please call me. You may also wish to look at the SHERPA there: contact zzzzzz or zzzzz. They have the SHERPA set up in Bldg. 22 (print only). I would imagine that zzzzz would give this kind of project some support. This is one way to make the 6670 do what the TV commercials show it doing.

.. snip ...

misc. past posts mentioning 3800 and-or 6670