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Home Forums 68kMLA Apple Personal Laserwriter 300 Series: Who is it? — #13
Post #13 by Concorde1993
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryPeripherals
Post DateWed, 24 Nov 2010 - 05:22
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-personal-laserwriter-300-series-who-is-it.21699/
Post
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.
The LaserWriters, ImageWriters & StyleWriters still have a long way to go in terms of retaining their useful nature. Remember, there is still a vast amount of people (like ourselves on the 68k forum) that still use the Classic systems for primitive word-processing, and as such require an Apple printer, or other genetically-comparable unit to work with the serial-8 architecture. These printers will "officially die" when the parts, ink, toner, ribbons, etc are no longer being manufactured, and sold.

I managed to pickup 4 brand-new IW II ribbons at Staples earlier this year for about $15 altogether. Of course, these are just standard black ribbons. The colour ones I had to do some serious searching on Craigslist/Kijiji in order to find a seller who had them. Fortunately, I did, and now I have about 20 colour ribbons still in their original shrink-wrap (and they're Apple-branded too!) for dirt cheap. I used one not too long ago to print a title page for an assignment (just for the heck of it). The quality, despite the fact that it is a 9-pin dot-matrix, was not too shabby. My teacher was impressed that I still had one (now two) kicking around.

But they did release a number of Postscript-language Personal LaserWriter models — the PLW 4/600, for example.
Well, forgive my ignorance then. If that was the case, why wasn't the 300-series Postscript? Was Apple really that desperate for printer market-share?

...16/600PS
Yep, I remember her. Very durable. My elementary school had one as their main network printer in the library from 1995-2002, until it was replaced by a HP Laserjet 4000 (or something like that). I was there not too long ago, and they are still using it.

mp.ls