roy@phri.UUCP.UUCP (05/09/86)
We've had an Apple LW here for some time, hooked up to our Vax as an off-line printer. One of the people here has a Mac and wants to get at the LW as well, but we can't figure out how to plug the damn thing in. We tried the obvious and just rigged up a cable to go from the 9-pin connector on the LW to the printer port on the Mac, trying various settings of the baud-rate/protocol switch on the LW. Of course, it didn't work. Do we really have to go out and buy that stupid AppleTalk network stuff just to get the Mac to talk to the LW on a one-to-one basis? The book that comes with the LW seems to imply that's the case, but there isn't much real technical information in there so who knows what the real story is? It just doesn't make any sense that we can't get 2 RS-232 devices to talk to each other with a simple piece of wire between them.