recommend me a ... Printer

[NJRoadfan]

These were so called "QuickDraw" printers. All the rendering was done on the machine itself and sent to the printer as a raster image. Generally no 3rd party drivers exist for these printers. The best printers to find are the ones that use Postscript and hopefully have Ethernet along with LocalTalk. I wouldn't go out of my way for a LaserWriter II though... they are BIG.

Many people (including myself) went with HP's LaserJet "M" line. These use the same Canon printer engines as Apple's printers and parts are generally easier to come by. The "M" models include built-in Postscript and LocalTalk support. The added bonus is that these printers will happily work with any other machine on your network (including modern Macs and PCs) since they also support PCL and have parallel ports and slots to add JetDirect Ethernet cards.

My recommendation for a good all around workhorse..... the LaserJet 4M or 4M+ or its Apple cousins the LaserWriter Pro 600 and Pro 630. These are based on the Sherman Tank of print engines, the Canon EX.

 

[adespoton]

I'm no expert on all the printers, but as far as I can remember the simple answer is no, that all the processing was offloaded to the Mac. I suppose it might be possible to share it from the Mac over the network? I know you could do that with some of the StyleWriter printers.

If you're happy running the abomination that is Quickdraw GX, I believe all the printers that it supported could be shared over Ethernet and AppleTalk. Back in the day, that was the one draw to installing GX on a Mac -- you could plug in most printers and have them immediately network-available complete with user prioritization, individual queues, and all the other stuff you'd associate with a network printer. Of course, that came with the cost that the computer wasn't usable for much else at the same time because GX was such a memory/process/everything hog.

 

[Durosity]

If you're happy running the abomination that is Quickdraw GX, I believe all the printers that it supported could be shared over Ethernet and AppleTalk. Back in the day, that was the one draw to installing GX on a Mac -- you could plug in most printers and have them immediately network-available complete with user prioritization, individual queues, and all the other stuff you'd associate with a network printer. Of course, that came with the cost that the computer wasn't usable for much else at the same time because GX was such a memory/process/everything hog.

Ah that I vaguely recall. I suppose one could just hook up an LC475 or something like that and effectively run it as a print server. That said, getting a networkable one would just be easier.