You compacters everywhere: Over the last three years, donations of Mac stuff to the senior center has piled up six LaserWriters. The pile was about to fall over so I had to attend to them before these heavy things hurt someone. Well, I know less than enough about LaserWriter to be dangerous. So I set about learning something and I need your help here with two of them.
The first is a LaserWriter IINT circa 1988. I made sure a IINT printer description file was in the Printer Descriptions folder and booted up. A trip to the Chooser set this Mac and printer to talking with each other just fine AppleTalk and all. Command+P, a little whirring, and in the time it took to sip at my coffee cup a coupla times, I had a beautifully printed piece of paper in my hands. This IINT worked. This is good. The second is a LaserWriter IIf circa 1991. Again, the IIf printer description file was in place, paper in the tray, and a fresh cup of coffee. I booted. The trip to the Chooser was going fine until during setup, an alert box popped up saying something about the printer having some sort of an issue with temperature that it was trying to fix. The bottom of my coffee came and went and still the alert box and the spinning beachball continued. After about twenty minutes, I restarted to see if that would help. A couple more restarts, another cup of coffee, and a couple of trips to the men's room and that pesky alert box about trying to fix a temperature problem was still with us. Hmmm... Now, the word temperature when spoken by a laser printer seems to me to be saying something is at issue with whatever it is that heats up that powdered plastic they call toner. When the problem won't go away, it seems to me that something is broken. My next guess is this something broken is the thing they call the fuser or something like the electronics that controls it. Well, up at the senior center, we are a no budget Mac program so we get real real fast. Fusers or any other variety of something that is broken costs money which we don't have. And we have near no use nor call for a laser printer at all. Our seniors love the little lightweight inkjet printers we have to loan out to them. Actually, I am a bit concerned for the safety of some of our seniors should we send a laser printer home with them. You see, we often discover that, in their home, they set their Mac up on a card table or other insufficient support. A perfectly good old LaserWriter would crush that card table probably taking out their cat on the way down. When seniors see a laser printer, they immediately select the ink jet as the laser printer is "So big". So after a couple of us Macheads read a few books and talked it over, we decided to junk the IIf as in dumpster city. So I wondered what we could salvage from the IIf. Well, there was the paper tray which was the same as the IINT. And the toner cartridge. It was the same shape as in the IINT though each had different Hewlett Packard part numbers. We shall see. And, oh yes, our reading said something about the IIf having removable memory SIMMs. I was thinking of those odd 64 pin SIMMs like the Mac IIfx uses. Well, let us have a look. I had no idea where Apple or Hewlett Packard might install SIMMs inside of a box like this. In less than a minute, I discovered that the whole bottom of a IIf and IINT for that matter is a pullout motherboard, processor, memory, ROM, a whole computer in there really. Wow! Eight SIMM slots proved to hold eight 1 MB 2 chip composite 30 pin SIMMs. This is not very exciting to this compacter. What was exciting was that it sure looked like this salvaged IIf motherboard would be an exact replacement for the motherboard of the working but older IINT. We shall see. Yup. Physically it fit. So we booted up. And, yup, doing setup in the Chooser, the Mac and the IINT both tell us that this is now a IIf. and it prints. This is good. Now for the questions: When we put a IIf motherboard into an older IINT, do we actually have a IIf now? Can the eight 1 MB SIMMs be replaced with something larger like 2, 4, 8, 16 MB 30 pin SIMMs? Is there any point? The IIf motherboard has a SCSI port on it. Is this for an external hard drive to store the whole world of Post Script printer fonts that we have been liberating? Anything else we can do with this SCSI port? I am not a fan of Post Script fonts. The IINT motherboard has an ADB port on it. At least it looks like an ADB port and it has an ADB icon. What in 'ell is this for? The IINT motherboard has two dip switches (S1). What for? Both the IINT and the IIf motherboards have a serial port which icon shows two opposing arrows. Does this tell me something I ought to know? I have tried three printer cables: one with the same opposing arrows embossed on each plug, one with only an Apple logo embossed on each plug, and a no-name cable with nothing showing on each plug. They all work with both motherboards in this printer. Any issue about what toner cartrige to use? They both work just fine. And, for extra credit, this is my bonus question: You see, this second running of the IINT with the IIf motherboard was having a little paper feed problem which didn't show during the earlier one page test. Most of the time, and after the lengthy first page startup procedure, the printer would report a paper jam problem. After much looking and futzing, it appears the intake rollers are having trouble moving the paper into the printer. It would work fine if I SLAMMED shut the big lid on top. But it takes a brutal slam and this is not good. Is this a clean, lube, and adjust exercise? Or do I recall that maybe these printers had a paper feed problem with some sort of kit to fix it? Or is this IINT in IIf clothing on its way to the dumpster also? Bill -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. 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