On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote:
I like the new types of peripherals but it makes me a little uncomfortable knowing that e.g. in the case of the uIEC-SD for Commodores, the clock speed of the peripheral is 16 to 20 times that of the original host CPU. I keep hatching little schemes of perhaps putting a tiny OS kernel in the thing, but at that point *it* would become the computer and the 128 would be just sort of sitting there. The same is true of the CosmosEx device I've been thinking of getting for my Atari STs; it has a Raspberry Pi inside.
I heard at the time, that the Apple Laserwriter was the "most powerful" machine that they made, and that certain people were connecting terminals to it and programming in Postscript. I did some trivial programming in Postscript, but didn't have a Laserwriter. It was a stack based language, with similarities to Forth. I suspect that the "terminals" were actually terminal emulation in whichever machines were currently connected anyway.
I made a company logo that was outline letters with a fill of lines radiating from a point (think about Moire pattern artifacts when pushing the resolution limits). Then I found that the "Freedom Of Press" Postscript emulation of the commercial large format printer was too slow, and did not have a large enough stack space. (whilst other deadlines were looming).
