In reply to a post by john2007:

Haven't lasers always been Postscript or equivalent?

Nope.

Certainly up to the LaserJet 4 I used to print direct from DOS. As MHC said, you could get PostScript options, but oh boy, did they cost!

I'm reasonably sure that the only thing preventing me printing to my old LJ4 from a Mac command line is lack of a Centronics port

Edited by billford (Mon 04-Jun-12 08:23:15)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/USB-Parallel-Centronics-Prin...

Technical Details
Not suitable for 64 bit OP systems

Despite the above, for a couple of quid it was worth a punt so I tried it ages ago... doesn't work on a Mac

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by john2007:

Haven't lasers always been Postscript or equivalent?

Nope.

Certainly up to the LaserJet 4 I used to print direct from DOS. As MHC said, you could get PostScript options, but oh boy, did they cost!

I'm reasonably sure that the only thing preventing me printing to my old LJ4 from a Mac command line is lack of a Centronics port

Doesn't necessarily mean they didn't need drivers to select fonts and type sizes. They were pretty expensive when they first came out, and I don't remember the office ones being particularly fast. A golf ball or daisy wheel printer would have been more versatile if lasers only had a single font and no graphics.

In reply to a post by john2007:

Doesn't necessarily mean they didn't need drivers to select fonts and type sizes.

The important word there is "necessarily", because they didn't need them. At least, the LaserJets that I used didn't.

Connect the printer up, boot to DOS, switch it on, wait for it to warm up and you could print from the command line, using the print command, copy <file> lpt1, or using redirection/piping. No drivers...

Certainly you could change the font (tho' I can't remember how), but if you didn't bother it defaulted to either Courier 10 or 12, I forget which.

Looks like someone else got it working http://www.electrictao.net/mac.shtml

That sounds like what the OP wants.

Looks like it might be useful for getting a Centronics printer recognised by OS X, but it doesn't address the OP's problem (or mine, come to that):

In reply to a post by Sandgrounder:

... which will print plain text files (without the use of a printer driver).
...

I'll carry on redirecting to a file and using TextEdit to print it on the Samsung laser, or if I really want to use the LaserJet for some reason, copy the file to the old Windows PC that has the LJ4L on it.

I think the Dos2USB is a solution for the OP - the main problem being connectivity, not the printer type..

Maybe. Ditto @ John.

But as we can't be sure which OS (or even which hardware- Raspberry Pi?) the OP is using, I think it's time to leave him to comment.