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Anyone know what this apple II card is exactly?

VERAULT

VERAULT

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So I was going through my cards and I found this apple II card. I thought it was a parallel printer card but when I looked it up, It seems it could be a print server card for sharing multiple printers across many apple II's. Whether its parallel or serial I dont know. It has a couple connection points and jumper blocks but I cant find any documentation on it. The really strange thing is the cardedge connector only has for pins in total making contact with the card slot! Anyone ever heard of the PACEMARK IIEASY PRINT ?
20191029_125038.jpg20191029_125051.jpg1.jpg2.jpg3.jpg4.jpg

IT didnt come with a ribbon cable and this parallel one I have here fits but I am not sure its correct.20191029_125129.jpg

I wanted to try some printing from an apple IIe of mine and this card seemed Ideal, but now I don't know.
 
I don't think there's any external software for the card. I suspect that it hooks to the native Apple printer interface connector for input. The cable looks like it's for the parallel-interface Apple II (C. Itoh) dot-matrix printer. I suspect that there's also a serial interface for the Imagewriter line. By itself, I suspect that the card is nothing more than a printer buffer.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I don't think there's any external software for the card. [...] By itself, I suspect that the card is nothing more than a printer buffer.
Click to expand...

It stands to reason, given there are only four pins wired on the bus connector.
 
4 pins must be +5v, ground, and +/- 12v (for the serial part).

I find it strange that they'd waste a slot instead of making it into some kind of external device with its own power supply.
 
Well, from the sketchy descriptions, one aspect was that several computers using these thingummies could share a single printer. So there's good reason to put one inside the box. Not that you couldn't do the same with an external box--they certainly existed. I had one and vendors like Inmac offered several different models.

The autoswitching ones detected when the printer wasn't being used and a print character came in and assigned the printer to the requestor for as long as it could supply data without going idle after a predetermined timeout.

A similar setup allowed several terminals to share a computer.
 
Awhile back, someone reverse-engineered this very card. The 40-pin chip on the card is actually a microprocessor - a 6502 just like the Apple II. As some have already mentioned, this card merely accesses power from the Apple II expansion bus. Otherwise, the card is actually a computer, just like the Apple II itself. It has the CPU, its own oscillator, RAM, ROM, and I/O. Although the card is designed for one purpose, with some know-how, someone could actually hack this card to go beyond just sharing one printer with multiple computers. Maybe write a ROM for the card, and somehow make it run programs.

https://jbevren.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/iieasy-print-recycling/
 
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Ok guys excuse my ignorance. I am just trying to visualize this working in my head. Its more of an external print server that is being powered by the apple II bus,, fine. But how does it look connected? Its got a DB25 connector (and a small 14 pin J2 connector which I really dont know). If I connect say the image writer II to it? how does it then receive print jobs? Does it require some kind of Y-Cable? One to the card and one to the printer? And if so how do the other computers connect to this printer at that point?
 
The only description of the card in use I can find is https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-10376500/option-to-networking-proves-easy-to-install Maybe tracking down the full issue of T.H.E. Journal or the mentioned MECC catalog would provide more information. A picture of a complete setup would explain a lot.

It appears to be a simple networking option. Several systems with cards can be connected to each other with a printer hanging off one of the systems in the cluster. The design sounds like it should be able to be a print cache if only attached to a single system but I don't have a manual to verify.
 
groink said:
Awhile back, someone reverse-engineered this very card. The 40-pin chip on the card is actually a microprocessor - a 6502 just like the Apple II. As some have already mentioned, this card merely accesses power from the Apple II expansion bus. Otherwise, the card is actually a computer, just like the Apple II itself. It has the CPU, its own oscillator, RAM, ROM, and I/O. Although the card is designed for one purpose, with some know-how, someone could actually hack this card to go beyond just sharing one printer with multiple computers. Maybe write a ROM for the card, and somehow make it run programs.

https://jbevren.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/iieasy-print-recycling/
Click to expand...

Um, did you read my reply at #2? Would have saved you some googling. :)
 
I found some information on this at one time. It appeared to use 2 wire transmission from the stations back to the print server, which strangely enough drove the printer :) So the 14pin J2 would support 7 clients.
 
Well, just looking at the IC layout, it would seem that the parallel-interface printer goes to J1 and the inter-station connections are RS232C and go to the 14-pin header. But the inter-station stuff is useless without more of these boards.

That much should be obvious. What am I missing?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Well, just looking at the IC layout, it would seem that the parallel-interface printer goes to J1 and the inter-station connections are RS232C and go to the 14-pin header. But the inter-station stuff is useless without more of these boards.

That much should be obvious. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

It wasn't obvious to me you'd need more than one board in the total setup.
 
I think the other boards were just typical serial boards that would connect to this board through one of the headers. The single header may have been a parallel but I don't see any reason it wasn't a serial header either. It might be more useful to locate the RS232 buffers on the board and trace there RS232 level pins to the headers.
Tracing some of the wires will follow to serial buffers of some type. These are easily looked up. I would guess that the serial to the other systems would require a serial out, serial in and ground as a minimum. The other systems, could include a serial from the system this board is mounted in.
Dwight
 
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