Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!dudevoir@bernoulli.Stanford.EDU From: dudevoir@bernoulli.Stanford.EDU (Glen P. Dudevoir) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Macplus to Laser writer no Apple talk. Keywords: appletalk,localtalk,laserwriter Message-ID: <11@bernoulli.stanford.edu> Date: 5 Aug 88 22:07:08 GMT References: <290@cmv.dsir.govt.nz> <7687@cup.portal.com> <4931@watdcsu.waterloo.edu> Reply-To: dudevoir@bernoulli.stanford.edu (Glen P. Dudevoir) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 32 This is really quite a simple problem. Appletalk is a 2 wire network. The Appletalk boxes that cost you $50 from Apple inductively couple couple both the transmit (two wires) and receive (two wires) to the single pair in Appletalk. All you need to do is connect the transmit of the laserwriter to the receive on the Mac(512e,plus,II) and vice versa. Both the Mac and the laserwriter are wired as DTE, ie they transmit and receive on the same pairs. It actually only takes three wires to make the cable work, use RxD-, TxD- and Gnd. The pinout for the connectors is below: DB-9 (Mac 512, LW LW+) Din-8 (Mac+,SE,II LW SC,NT,NTX) ---------------------- ------------------------------ pin signal pin signal 1 Gnd 4 Gnd 3 Gnd 5 TxD- 5 RxD- 9 RxD- 3 TxD- This type of cable is generally known as a null modem. In this case there is no need to include the other modem signals like DTR or CTS. Please excuse any terminology errors with regard to the difference between appletalk and localtalk. I can't keep straight which is the software and which is the hardware. You must make sure that you are using the appletalk port on both the mac(printer port) and the laserwriter(db-9 for LW,LW+ and din-8 for LW SC,NT,NTX). I guarantee that it works. We have an SE connected to a LW+ and a MACII connected to an NT in this manner. Glen