I have this HP LaserJet 6MP, the last printer Hewlett-Packard ever sold with true PostScript rather than an erratic emulator, and it was good to me back in the days of OS 9. Come OS X I had to hunt down a black box, a "Dayna EtherPrint-T," that connected to my old B&W tower by means of an ethernet cable and spoke to the printer over AppleTalk or LocalTalk or whatever the fuck they were calling that protocol toward the end. My abortive attempt to upgrade to Panther killed the connection, and even after I finally limped back to a Jaguar downgrade months later, the B&W and the printer could never again be persuaded to associate. Between Tiger and the new processor architecture I had no better luck with the Intel iMac, and research suggested that Tiger would not countenance any Apple/LocalTalk link in the chain regardless of the intermediary. I have accordingly acquired a Hewlett-Packard "JetDirect EX Plus," still another black box that takes the printer's native cable on one end and ethernet on the other. I'm pleased to report that it works like a charm. At the moment the HP box has sole possession of my single ethernet port, and i'm using the iMac's native wireless capability to post this. I'm hoping that one of the ethernet hubs I have lying around will permit a nice physical connection to both the printer and to the wide world. I'm deeply pleased to have recovered the ability to print at home.

cordially,