Printing Question

I have a Powermac 9600 connected to a stylus 900 (connected via a serial port) as well as a Powerbook 500 mhz with USB and firewire ports.

Both computers, as well as a third computer (also mac) are connected together via an LinkSys Etherfast router and ethernet cables.

My question is:

Is it possible to get all the computers to print to the stylus printer over the lan, and if so, how would I accomplish doing so?

I’d prefer not buying anymore hardware if at all possible.

Thanks in advance

There are a variety of ways to do this. The coolest way is to install a software RIP. The most feature-packed version that runs an Epson 900 is Adobe’s PressReady. Alas, the product is discontinued, although still for sale, they’re just not adding any new printer support. Too bad, it was a damn good product, I use it on my Epson 1520 and it works great.
Anyway, if you run a software RIP, your computer will appear on the network as a printer, gather the print job from your ethernet, rasterize it, then send it to the serial printer. And the RIP provides full PostScript ability, as well as colorsync color matching. The downside is that it takes a big chunk of CPU time, your CPU doesn’t get locked up, the RIP runs in the background, but foreground jobs will be a little sluggish whenever someone else prints a complex page.
There are less feature-filled programs that allow you to share printers across a network, but I haven’t used any of them. I think there’s an official Apple gadget, Printer Share, or some such thing. Epson also makes a similar gadget, IIRC. Poke around the epson and apple websites for info. The advantage of these gadgets is that they just pass printer data through from the incoming ethernet and toss it onto the serial port. No fancy features, no PostScript, just Quickdraw features like you’re probably using now.
So consider those, poke around, if you can’t find anything that works for you, let me know and I’ll see if I can help further…

first of all, thank you for your informative and speedy reply. I tried a search for the apple utility on versiontracker to no avail but I did find the Epson utility by the name of Epson Share which does exactly what I need.

thank you once again

Glad I could help. It’s really great when the solution is freeware, isn’t it?

yep sure is, thanks again for the advice & solution =)