To get the best out of a laser printer, you need to have a pretty powerful computer in there – the 68000 family is still the favourite, but the NS32000 has been moving up strongly on the rails – but Conographic Inc of Irvine, California reckons that it has gone three or four better. The company has entered the market for laser printer controller boards with the ConoDesk 6000 add-in card for IBM Personal family, including the PS/2 Model 30. Key feature is that the board is built around a proprietary 32-bit bit-slice processor that Conographic claims is 30 to 100 times more powerful than the 68020. The board is the first Conographic product to incorporate what the company calls the ConoChannel architecture, which enables high-speed data transfers among different Conographic controllers, sharing of processors and memories, a common interface for porting software, and ease of expansion. It takes output from page composition software such as PageMaker or Ventura Publisher at the rated speed of the print engine, which can be more than 25 pages per minute in some instances. The 6000 also provides selected print resolutions, a scanner interface, fast font conversion of type outlines to bitmaps, and font formats compatible with Ventura Publisher, Hewlett-Packard soft fonts, and Microsoft Windows. Up to 2Mb of RAM, which can also be used as Extended Memory, can be installed on the card. Conographic is also bringing out the first clone of Adobe’s PostScript to make it to market, according to Microbytes Daily. The PostScript-compatible page description language, called ConoScript, will allow the interchange of files between PostScript and ConoScript devices. Samples of the ConoDesk 6000 will be available in July, and volume deliveries are planned to follow in September, at a single-unit price of $2,000.
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