Those two printers I presently have on the network at home.
At the office (where I have to supply my own equipment, though I do have a budget line for it), I still use a LaserWriter Pro 630, which is the same shape as the 16/600. The 16/600 was manufactured maybe two years later than the LW Pro 630, using the same case, fuser etc., but it has a different logic board and has a much faster (RISC, I believe) processor. The LW Pro 630 is powered by a 68030 and 68882, running at a mere 25MHz or some such.
Still, it is great to have something that can do Appletalk over two ports at once, that can be upgraded to 32MB of RAM, and that just keeps rolling out the pages without a hitch. Oh, and not the least of its virtues is that I bought it for something like $20 seven or eight years ago, plus I discover that refilling the toner cartridge makes it astonishingly economical — you can get 3 or maybe 4 refills and so something like 20k of clearly printed pages for peanuts. Heck, I can buy a brand new toner cartridge for $25-30, because of their ubiquity (it's a very common HP part number) and because of their age (suppliers want rid of them). Why get a new one when the old does so well?
Unfortunately, the LW Pro 630 cannot be set up as an LPR printer without using an additional machine, for which the LPR function in A/UX is one possibility, or more straightforwardly, the print server in any version of AppleShare IP. The ability to set the IP address of a LaserWriter printer itself using Apple Printer Utility and then to print to it using built-in LPR functionality was only added to the LaserWriter series, I believe, with the introduction of the 16/600. After that it became standard on the high-end LaserWriters. Thus, for instance, it is not possible on my low-end 4/600, but it is on my highish-end 12/640, which date from exactly the same period.
Now that printing over Appletalk has been abandoned in OSX, I can see the end of some of these great old machines looming — only not yet.
At the office (where I have to supply my own equipment, though I do have a budget line for it), I still use a LaserWriter Pro 630, which is the same shape as the 16/600. The 16/600 was manufactured maybe two years later than the LW Pro 630, using the same case, fuser etc., but it has a different logic board and has a much faster (RISC, I believe) processor. The LW Pro 630 is powered by a 68030 and 68882, running at a mere 25MHz or some such.
Still, it is great to have something that can do Appletalk over two ports at once, that can be upgraded to 32MB of RAM, and that just keeps rolling out the pages without a hitch. Oh, and not the least of its virtues is that I bought it for something like $20 seven or eight years ago, plus I discover that refilling the toner cartridge makes it astonishingly economical — you can get 3 or maybe 4 refills and so something like 20k of clearly printed pages for peanuts. Heck, I can buy a brand new toner cartridge for $25-30, because of their ubiquity (it's a very common HP part number) and because of their age (suppliers want rid of them). Why get a new one when the old does so well?
Unfortunately, the LW Pro 630 cannot be set up as an LPR printer without using an additional machine, for which the LPR function in A/UX is one possibility, or more straightforwardly, the print server in any version of AppleShare IP. The ability to set the IP address of a LaserWriter printer itself using Apple Printer Utility and then to print to it using built-in LPR functionality was only added to the LaserWriter series, I believe, with the introduction of the 16/600. After that it became standard on the high-end LaserWriters. Thus, for instance, it is not possible on my low-end 4/600, but it is on my highish-end 12/640, which date from exactly the same period.
Now that printing over Appletalk has been abandoned in OSX, I can see the end of some of these great old machines looming — only not yet.