• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Early LaserWriter ROM dumps

oldappleguy

Well-known member
Its going to be tough to find. Many folks upgraded their ROMs with the LaserWriter Plus font set. On top of that, most of these printers have long since been tossed. Heck, I can't even find a disk image of the original LaserWriter 1.0 driver (called "LaserWriter Installation Disk"). It doesn't help that Apple's directions state to discard the earlier software.
is this what you are looking for?
 

Attachments

  • IMG_0055.jpeg
    IMG_0055.jpeg
    1.6 MB · Views: 12
  • IMG_0057.jpeg
    IMG_0057.jpeg
    1.3 MB · Views: 12
  • IMG_0058.jpeg
    IMG_0058.jpeg
    1.4 MB · Views: 12

olePigeon

Well-known member
Oh OK. In regards to the disks, early disks (especially from the 80s) often had various forms of copy protection. Even Apple's own software.
 

al kossow

Active member
I don't think any Mac system software disks were copy protected,
at least I've never run into any that couldn't be copied with DC42.

I know MDS is, which was licensed from Bill Duvall.
It would be nice if someone came up with a list of the problem children.

The earliest LW driver that I have is 2.0

It would also be a good thing to get resource and data fork hashes for
all of the files on those early disks.
 

Dandu

Well-known member
Just in case : i have dumped the ROM from the LaserWriter Pro 810 and i serahc to extract a PostScript File (i mean).

The ROM is here : down.dandu.be/ROMcostena.bin

Actually, there is an easter egg on the printer : it's possible to send a fax directly to a restaurant (La Costena) to command Burrito. And the text is on the printer ROM. I will try to exctract the file to try to print the file. I suppose it will be PostScript, but i'm not sure.
 

chi100

Member
Dandu, are you able to take a high res picture of the main board of the Laserwriter Pro 810? That could help figure out how to do something useful with the ROM.
 

mcpublic

Member
Excellent. Let us know if-and-when you get around to disassembling them. If Adobe's first PostScript interpreter wasn't written in assembly language, "I'm a monkey's uncle."
 

chi100

Member
This is confirmed by "'PostScript' prints anything: a case history" which says "They worked in C, on a VAX 750 running Berkeley Unix, to develop the language, and they tested it on a Sun workstation driving a full-size laser printer that they borrowed from Digital Equipment Corp."
 
Top