One of the hotter properties spotted at a pretty lukewarm Comdex show last week was an Inmos Transputer-based laser printer controller said to be able to drive laser print engines at up to 45 pages a minute. Called the Grip – for Generic Raster Image Processor – it comes from CSS Laboratories Inc, Irvine, California and, reports Microbytes, it comes on an MS-DOS board and will be programmable for different print engines, sending commands to a personality module in the printer. First version is for the Ricoh 4015 15 page-per-minute, but software is downloaded from disk, so that once the board is installed, users can change print engine without having to buy a new controller.
