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HP LaserJet/JetDirect printing

CelGen

Well-known member
I have an HP LaserJet 4M Plus that sits in the living room and everything in the house connects to it using a JetDirect card fitted in it. It supports AppleTalk and my later OS 9 system could print directly to it but I'm having trouble getting my older System 7.6 Quadra 950 to see it. Did the JetDirect require an extension on older systems? I can't double check my settings on the OS 9 box right now as it was put in storage when I moved several months back.

 

trag

Well-known member
I don't know the answer to your question specifically, but I will note that my Kyocera Color Laser Printer with Postscript prints fine from OS 9.x but not from my installation of OS 8.x.

I suspect that a newer version of the LaserWriter Driver (extension) is needed. So that may be your need. See if the LaserWriter extension in your 7.6 installation is particularly old.

Of course, the LaserJet 4M is ancient, so it can't require especially modern Mac extensions.

You might just try a google search on *LaserJet 4M Macintosh system requirements* and see what comes up. Oh, you may wish to throw jetdirect into that search as well...

 

CelGen

Well-known member
Okay, I'll pull the LaserWriter driver off my OS 9 disc and see waht happens when I plant it in 7.6.

 

CelGen

Well-known member
There's stuff for OSX but I find nothing for the older OS's

Hmm, I can't actually fire up the installer for OS9 from the 950 as it fails to make minimum requirements.

Anyways, noob me somehow forgot to set the Appletalk port to the Ethernet connection.

So it seems the ghetto way to make it work on a mac is to use the LaserWriter 8 printer in the chooser as it sees it, thne select from a wide range of printers and hope one of them is the closest match to the LaserJet.

OR

I discovered that HP still supplies a driver for classic macs. The software and utility download still works but the font installer does not want to download. :?: HP states that the minimum OS that it will work on is OS 8 but it unstuffed and installed fine on 7.6.1 short of a garbage script put in the startup items folder that I threw out.

Anyways, after that my "LaserWriter 8" printer no longer worked but "LaserWriter 8f" did work (Hmm, I don't recall that being there originally, thena gain I didn't keep track of what was installed so I'll see if it returns when I do a reinstall when my Appleshare server is up) and so I setup the printer using the appropriate printer descriprion I installed earlier and there we go.

 
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