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Re: [TCLUG:892] LaserWriter II on a PC?



On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, Tim Wilson wrote:

> Someone donated an old Apple LaserWriter II printer to our computer lab
> effort. I'm wondering if it's possible to it with a PC and Linux? It's
> got
> two ports on the back that look like parallel ports, but I think they're
> SCSI ports (not sure about that, though). There's also a serial port. I

most of the laserwriters had scsi ports for connecting drive space to
store fonts locally

> guess that's probably Appletalk. It was manufactured in 1989.

Only the higher models (IIg etc) have a network connection right on 'em
which would make things easy for you (just connect via ethernet).

I think there should be a way to connect it via the serial port,
presumably through that port, if you can get it to not speak appletalk.

> Is this possible? We do have an old Mac SE. Can you put Linux on one of
> the old Macs? If so, I could probably use it as a print server.

With the SE you are pretty stuck, since it has only a 68000 (no memory
management).. no unix will work on that (netbsd is the only reasonable 68k
mac option anyway).  If you can't get the serial port to work from the
pc, you for sure can run MacOS on the SE and share the printer via
ethernet (do you have an ethernet card for the SE?) and print to it via
netatalk or you could run MacLPD (available at the mac archives.. try
mirror.apple.com).