Who Remembers a Generic Printer Driver Under System 6 or Before?

[Elfen]

Long ago, I had an Epson dot matrix with a wide track for those wide Green/White folded paper. It can on both my Mac IIcx and Atari ST. But in searching my hard drives, I could not find the Epson drivers and am wondering if there was a generic printer driver then. If so, is it still out there?

 

[Charlieman]

Microsoft provided generic drivers as part of the kit for their parallel/serial expander for compact Macs. MS may not have been the authors of those drivers. I think some drivers may also be found on the disks for MS Word 3.x and earlier.

 

[NJRoadfan]

The closest I have from the System 6 era is the Orange Micro Grappler LX. It uses the Imagewriter LQ driver to print to parallel 24-pin Epson LQ printers, the adapter handles the serial to parallel conversion and converts the driver's escape codes to Epson escape codes. They also made a Grappler 9-pin, which worked with the Imagewriter driver (on both Macs and the Apple II) and Epson FX compatible 9-pin parallel dot matrix printers.

 

[Charlieman]

The MS device for compact Macs was called the MacEnhancer. It was later sold by Phoenix, the company responsible for many PC BIOS implementations.

After struggling in the wrong room, I found my boxed Orange Micro Grappler 9-pin adapter. As NJRoadfan notes, it comprises a serial to parallel adapter, with drivers for Apple II and Mac. 

Tscript made a PostScript translator which worked with various printers -- not recommended for a 24-pin dot matrix. But it shipped with a serial to parallel adapter, as did some HP printers.

 

[NJRoadfan]

I should add that the Grappler LX supports HP PCL printers as well (box says Laserjet and original Deskjet), not just Epson LQ (technically any Epson ESC/P compatible printer). Besides higher resolution printing, the serial to parallel adapter was upgraded to 57.6kbps communication, up from the 9600bps the Grappler 9-pin ran at. Orange Micro's last product in that line was the Grappler IIsp, but I have yet to find much info or acquire one. What little I can find about it is that it adds support for Canon Bubblejet printers and the unit is self powered, not needing an AC adapter.