Re: Mac/PC help w/laserwriter

Thomas Roth(tomroth[at]wfubmc.edu)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 19:08:46 +0200

>I am trying to use my Mac LaserPrinter 4/600 PS with my PC running Win98.
>The 4/600 is a postscript printer and uses a serial port.
...snip...
>I tried
>connecting it to the printer port and to a serial port on the PC--neither
>worked. According to the Apple support website, the 4/600 is not designed
>to work with PCs, but others have told me not to give up. Does anyone have
>any experience with this or have any advice in how to hook up/configure my
>computer to run this Mac printer?

I have a solution but it's not a simple one. Our Associate Director got
one of these printers to hook up to his Macintosh. That worked simple
enough though we discovered that you have to load the LaserWriter Bridge
software Control Panel on the host Mac just to be able to print to it even
though it was connected to the Mac's serial port.

Later he also got a Win95 laptop and wanted to be able to print to the
4/600 from it as well. In the LaserWriter Bridge Control Panel there's a
switch for Public and Private. We had it set on Private so that only his
Mac would see it otherwise it would broadcast via AppleTalk throughout our
whole Zone and all Macs would see it and could print to it. But in order
to get his Win95 laptop to print to it we did set the LaserWriter Bridge
Control Panel to Public so that it would broadcast the printer. (Note that
this is much different then most Apple LaserWriters which don't require the
LaserWriter Bridge software.)

Then, from our NT Server which was already running Services for Macintosh
(and so AppleTalk was installed) I created a Print Queue for the 4/600
using AppleTalk protocol as the means to connect to the printer. This
could be done with a Netware server as well provided it was running
AppleTalk Printing Services (ATPS).

So you see, it can be done.

 ___________________________________________________________________________
 Tom Roth Wake Forest University School of Medicine
 tomroth@wfubmc.edu Dept of Biomedical Communications
 Tel 336.716.4493 Medical Center Blvd
 Fax 336.716.2808 Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1011
 ___________________________________________________________________________

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