The Apple Laserwriter II NT

I was given one of these several years ago. Unfortunately it was stored for many years in a hot shed, and now that I want to use it, the rubber rollers are cracked and dried out and it won't feed paper. The electronics seems just fine, one fan makes an unhappy noise.

The Apple Laserwriter II is a 300 dpi laser printer that was on the market from January, 1988 through Ocober of 1991.

There is also the NTx, which is the same printer with a different logic card, slightly faster processor, and the ability to add more memory.

This printer weighs 45 pounds. The vanilla NT version has a 11.5 Mhz 68000 processor and will print (they say) 8 pages per minute. A 300,000 page minimum lifetime is claimed (and is probably true, unless rubber parts deteriorate)

The interface is either local-talk (apple-talk) or RS232. The default RS232 baud rate is 9600, but it can be set via software to 38400 or 56700 (you just "print" a file with the appropriate postscript).

This printer, like the entire Apple Laserwriter family, and many other printers as well, is based on the Canon LBP-SX engine, commonly known as the "SX engine". This is good because it means that toner cartridges are widely available.

My printer came to me with an HP LaserJet 92295A cartidge in it. (These days just known as a 95A cartridge). You can expect to print 4000 pages per toner cartridge (normal text)

Here are some resources, both the user manual and a service manual are available online.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!