Another option is to create a dual boot system with Boot Camp, but this is not nearly as practical. If you use Mac to design and windows to run laser control software you would need to reboot your computer and switch an operating system every time you have to make modifications to your designs. This will get tedious quite quickly. I’ve spent some hours reverse engineering the NEJE laser engraver protocol and wrote a simple Mac OS X application based on it.This demonstration displays th.

Apple LaserWriter II – Never Say Die

As a potential destination for disposing of old, unwanted Apple crap – err, I mean as Curator of the Vintage Mac Museum – I am contacted fairly regularly by folks who are looking for good homes for their old equipment. A few months ago one such query came from a fellow with a few old Mac drives, several piles of software on floppy disks, and one never-say-die behemoth called the Apple LaserWriter IIg.

Back in the day Apple sold a variety of peripherals along with computers – printers, scanners, cameras, monitors (they still sell these), etc.. The original LaserWriter was a groundbreaking piece of equipment, launching the desktop publishing revolution in conjunction with the Mac Plus and a new font format called Adobe PostScript.

The LaserWriter begat the LaserWriter II, which was offered in many different flavors: IISC, IINT, IINTX (with special high speed RAM), IIf and IIg. Using Canon print engines and built like tanks, these workhorses helped many businesses and graphic designers earn their livings.

I’d been looking for a LaserWriter of this vintage for some time to help with the Mac Museum’s file transfer and conversion efforts. While most old formats can be converted, a few are rare or restricted enough that the only options available are taking screen snapshots or printing to hardcopy. Since you can’t print from a Mac Plus to anything modern, a vintage LaserWriter would be the next best thing.

The LaserWriter IIg measures 20.2 inches wide, 18.7 inches deep and 8.7 inches tall – not including space for the paper tray which sticks out one end. This is substantially larger than most modern printers. It also weighs 45 pounds, which makes it a joy to get in and out of your car and up to the second floor. Nevertheless I wrangled this puppy from a suburban Massachusetts garage back to the VMM, blew out the dust, hooked it up via LocalTalk phone connectors, and printed out a few pages. Twenty years after it was manufactured the thing still worked, albeit with a few creaks and groans.

Fast forward a few months, and a job comes in to Oakbog involving Microsoft Word v3 files with a combination of English and Ukrainian text. The owner sent along a copy of the Cyrillic font he had used with the original files, so I added this to my old Mac’s Font folder and was able to open and convert the data to modern Word .doc format.

A few days after I emailed things back my client contacted me again. Apparently his newer Mac and printer could not render the old fonts properly, so he asked if I could print out copies of the files containing the Cyrillic text.

Piece of cake, I thought – LaserWriter II to the rescue! I installed the Cyrillic font on my PowerBook 540c, selected the LaserWriter via the Chooser, and started to print out a document. The green light started blinking, a piece of paper got pulled from the tray, then BAM – the red paper jam light turns on. Feh. Well, some challenges are to be expected from twenty year old technology.

I opened the printer and pulled out the page – this was no small feat, as I have the printer installed on the floor underneath a small table and the cover can only open a few inches in this location. Close things up, try again, another jam. Frustrating, as it had worked fine just a few weeks before.

After several rounds of paper clearing, a few whacks to the side of the unit, blowing out dust with a can of compressed air and several “choice words” said to its face, I finally got the unit printing again. I think the compressed air was what did the trick, probably some dust on an internal sensor. Slowly and methodically I printed out about 200 pages of Ukrainian text. The room now had that familiar odor of hot plastic and fused toner we all used to know so well, but the job was complete.

I turned off the printer, had a glass of wine (or three), and mailed the pages back to my client. The LaserWriter may now be fine forever, or it may die again tomorrow – hard to tell with these old machines. One thing’s for sure, they don’t make ’em like they used to. Which is a mixed blessing…

Posted by Adam Rosen on November 19th, 2011 in Vintage Mac Museum Blog 21 Comments »

The Laser Sacrificer Mac Os X


How Much Is My Old Mac Worth? »

  1. Greetings,
    I have a Apple LaserWriter ll if you are interested. It has been a few years since I have used it, but it was still working then.
    Thanks
    Lois

    • I am in need of working laserWriter II. Please let me know if you have one to sell.

  2. I’m looking for an apple laser writer 4/600 ps. If anyone knows of one, please let me know. Thank you.

    • Julie, I’ve been looking to see if I can get anything out of this 4/600 or just throw away or save for posterity. don’t really know if it works but I do have one. Wish I could send a pic.

  3. Hi there to all!

    I have a LaserWriter IINT in (what was when I last turned it off years ago) excellent condition. If someone has interest in purchasing this wonderful (and formerly quite expensive) piece of Apple Magic.. let me know?

    Voiceman615 Voiceman615@Commercialtalent.com

  4. I have an LaserWriter II to give away to anyone who will pay the shipping (I am in Indiana). I inherited it when my office upgraded to newer Mac equipment, but I have never used it. I don’t know what letter of the alphabet this model is (it doesn’t say).

  5. Adam, just picked up a LWII!!! Replaced power supply, AC supply board, fuser and pickup roller!!! She’s as good as new!!! I also retrobrited her!!! She’s putty gray new!!!

  6. Any idea how to connect an old Personal LaserWriter (Serial/LocalTalk) to a modern day MacPro (G5/DualCore)?
    Thanks

  7. I have a LaserWriter llcx which I had upgraded to xante Accel-A-Writet. I’m remembering that it had better quality printing with the upgrade! Lol I bet it still works!!

  8. WANTED – A working Apple Colour Laserwriter 12/600PS. Please call if you can help on 07774 882346

  9. I have a Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS prints B&W only that I dearly love. It has served me with very few problems since I purchased it new. Lately it has been jamming and I was told it was the cassette pickup roller. I removed it. The rubber seemed remarkable flexible and I assumed that it was not picking up because of the “paper dust” from the paper. I cleaned the rubber portion with Goof Off and it seemed ready to go. When I tried to replace the roller one of the little plastic fingers that holds it in place broke. I love this printer. Does anyone have a non working 12/640 that I can have the pickup roller. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

  10. i have a IINTX (works) that i would like to find a home for. just pay shipping. i live in SW Virginia. janehamilton@verizon.net

  11. Anyone have a working laserwriter ll they want to get rid of.

    thanks
    Dave

  12. I’m looking for a recipient for my Apple Laserwriter IINT, for which I paid $3,000 in 1988. It is in perfect shape. I live in Newark, DE, and I will donate it (but not pay to ship). It hasn’t been used for 27 years….(but I did replace some major part in it years ago).

    Cathy Middleton Raphael (it was bought from Washington College, Chestertown, MD – a Mac school – shortly after I left working there….)

  13. We are looking for 2 working fax machines from 1984-1988 time period for a movie. Do you have any or know where I may find them that are period correct please. Thank you

    Post note; they need to be in working order and I need to be able to purchase the period correct paper that works with them also. Thank you

  14. Damn. I had a LW Select 360 (the beige beast). Wonderful fast printer, but I was eventually unable to find toner cassettes for it. I could get refurbished ones for awhile, and, then, none. I was offered a kit, where one drilled a hole in the cartridge and filled it with powder from a flask. I declined… Also, I started having trouble with the paper feed. When I got an Epson color jet printer for a pittance, it went to recycling (and that was after I found another going to the scrap heap & extracted its toner cassette…). Too bad my model was the one with only serial. Didn’t these also come with Ethernet?
    I also had an NT before that. It simply died on me one day, after having worked flawlessly for years.
    They all met their sad ends as electronics recycling. As for the Epson, event though it had both serial (for Mac) _and_ USB, it, too, went the way of all electronics. It got weird on me, probably because of dried-up ink. I skimped on printing from it, since carts were a wee bit costly, and the briliant idea of having C/M/Y in _one_ cartridge, so if one color ran out, you had to buy a new cart.
    My present printer is a Brother b/w laser, USB, shared from my Mini.
    Since I havent found a way to print to it from my OS 9.2.2 G3, I make PDFs with Distiller (I mean, I print to file & distill it to a PDF, which I can send to the Mini for print).
    Seems to me I was trying to off the Select(s) to some Swedish collector, but he never answered my e-mails…

  15. I have a working LaserWriter II NT in excellent condition, used for 10 years in my typesetting business before storing it in a home closet with AC. Comes with all cables and trays. This puppy reliably printed anything I threw at it: layouts, graphics, music scores, envelopes, all at 300 dpi laser resolution. Will accept best offer plus shipping costs to give it a useful second life. Contact steve_deyo at that hotmail place. Cheers!

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If you were a Mac user trying to get into laser cutting a couple of years ago your options regarding software would have been quite limited. You could either:

  1. Buy a cheap PC and install windows on it (popular option even today because you probably don’t want to keep your Mac in the workshop)
  2. Run Windows in a virtual machine-based environment on a Mac or
  3. Go for an expensive top brand machine that comes with proprietary “print drivers” for Mac OS.

Luckily, technology and software are developing rapidly so in this day and age there are plenty of options (paid and free) to choose from if you are not Windows OS user.

Now, before we get started it’s important to make a distinction between laser control software (which is software that communicates with laser cutting machine) and laser design software (app used to create graphics). There are few laser controlling software that offers some designing capabilities and in recent years they got better from designing point of view. But even so, for any serious designing you will need to use proper vector drawing app because control software is just not as capable (which is understandable, it’s not meant to be a drawing software).

We will skip option a) since it is pretty straightforward and not relevant for this article and go straight for the next one which is…

Run Windows on a Mac

This option is best used if you have a specific program that you want or need to use which works only on Windows. Controllers in Chinese manufactured laser cutting machines use specific software which is usually windows based (RuiDa controllers work with RDWorks software, Trocen controllers with LaserCAD etc…) so if you want to use this type of software you will need a Windows environment for that. If you have one of these Chinese controllers there is alternative software that works on a Mac, but we will get to it later in this article.

If you don’t want to go for option a) (buy dedicated Windows machine) but still want to use Windows-based software you can install windows on a Mac OS as a virtual machine using Parallels application. With the Parallels app you can run Windows OS inside an app so you can have windows and Mac apps side by side. This will allow you to use best from both worlds and seamlessly copy and paste between 2 operating systems. It’s easy to install and workflow is quite fluid as long as you have enough RAM to accommodate both operating systems. The downside to this is the price. Parallels license cost $80 which is steep for this type of software and you still have to buy a license for Windows. There is a free alternative to the Parallels app called VirtualBox which is not as smooth as the Parallels app but still more than usable.

Another option is to create a dual boot system with Boot Camp, but this is not nearly as practical. If you use Mac to design and windows to run laser control software you would need to reboot your computer and switch an operating system every time you have to make modifications to your designs. This will get tedious quite quickly. At that point it’s better to go and get cheap used PC, install windows on it and share files over the network.

Brand related software

Top brands in laser manufacturing businesses like Epilog or Trotec offer their laser control software in a form of print drivers and they have Mac version of these drivers. You need to have some vector drawing software (like Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or Corel for Mac) you will use to create a graphic that you can then “print” on a laser cutter using provided print drivers. But these machines are quite expensive since these are machines from top branded, western manufacturers.

There are some more affordable brands (like GlowForge, Full Spectrum Laser, and Dremel) that have also created software for their laser cutters.

The Laser Sacrificer Mac Os Catalina

GlowForge has a web-based software for which you gain access when you buy a laser cutter from them and which you use from your web browser. The problem with this is that the app itself is hosted on GlowForge servers so internet access is required for you to be able to use it.

Full Spectrum and Dremel also provide their software (Retina engrave and DigiLab) through a browser but the difference is that the app itself is hosted locally on the machine itself so you can use it even without an internet connection. You only need to have your PC and the machine on the same network.

Since all these apps are browser-based they will all work on every OS including Mac of course, and you will not have to install anything for it to work, just connect your laser with your computer and you are good to go. Another good thing with all of this browser-based software is that they all offer some designing tools so you don’t need to have additional vector drawing software. But this is only true for some basic jobs and for anything more complex you will need to use some dedicated graphic software.

The downside is that these machines only work with provided software (however good or bad you find it to be) and you can’t use anything else because of the integrated controller is made to communicate with that software only.

Other software

K40 Whisperer + Inkscape

Chinese K40 lasers are the cheapest CO2 lasers you can find and because of that are quite popular with beginners and hobbyist. They usually come with old M2 nano controllers and Windows-based LaserDRW software + some older (and probably pirated) version of CorelDraw. To make these lasers more user friendly the guy from ScorchWorks created K40Whisperer which is (thankfully) Mac compatible. Installation can be a bit tricky since you’ll need to use the command line but it’s doable and free. It also requires you to have Inkscape installed (you can find a Mac version on the official website inkscape.org).

Inkscape is quite powerful yet free and open-source vector drawing software used by many in the laser cutting community. Great community around this software helped create lots of useful extensions for lasers and there are also lots of tutorials for it including quite a good built-in interactive one.

All in all for those hobbyists who look get into laser cutting and are trying to spend the least amount of money possible on a laser cutting machine and software, you really can’t beat a K40+Whisperer+Inkscape combo since your only cost will be the cost of the K40 machine itself.

Lightburn

Lightburn is a good option for those Mac users who look to spend a bit of money to make their life a lot easier. It supports lots of controllers (RuiDa, Trocen, Smoothieboard, GRBL, Marlin, etc) with more being added all the time and it has a native Mac version. It’s primarily laser control software but it offers lots of vector drawing features so you can design using only Lightburn. Sometimes there is still a need for standalone vector drawing app but we found that we are more frequently using Lightburn to quickly design everything but most complex jobs. This is because with each new version more and more vector drawing features are being added and since Lightburn is made with laser cutting in mind those features are something that you will find yourself using. You can even suggest new features and if it gets enough votes developers will implement it in some of the future updates.

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The downside (and that’s the only downside we found so far) is that it costs money. Lightburn license cost $40 for Gcode and $80 for DSP (RuiDa, Trocen…) controllers with another 30$ a year if you want to receive additional updates. If not, you can continue to use Lightburn as is with no additional cost.

This is the cost of a Parallels app license for example but with Parallels you still have to figure out laser control and design software, windows license and you still don’t get the same level of comfort or productivity as with Lightburn.

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LaserHint: use Ethernet connection instead of USB to connect your laser to the Mac because there are some well known issues with FTDI drivers on a Mac which is causing problems on laser cutter and other devices that use this way of communicating with Mac. While these issues can be solved, its easier to just use Ethernet connection and skip them entirely.

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These are options for Mac users. For those of you who already own a laser cutting machine the brand of the machine and type of the controller will in most cases determine which software you can use, but for others who are looking to get into this world, the choice of software can help steer them in the right direction.

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