What OS will you use for the printer? Old printers means old drivers and newer systems are probably not supported anymore.

The good news is that toner doesn't clog like inkjet ink does - assuming the printer hasn't been stored somewhere damp.

That's really the crux, what 25 years of storage has done to the beast. I'd check rubber parts for decay (rollers), then check the fuser and the drum. Sometimes the drum is contained in the toner cartridge, on older designs it's not. It is probably the most vulnerable bit. Be sure to choose a type with available drums as well as toner.

That said, I've found a lot of old laserprinters to be bulletproof; I used an old HP Laserjet II as a student, which was working when I replaced it with another 2nd hand Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS 1/4 of its size (seriously, that LJII was as big as a coffee table). That in turn served me from around 2001 to 2012 when I replaced it - also still working - with a Samsung multifunction colour laserprinter/scanner. Which sadly died in within five years (after replacing drum, rollers, fuser and complete set of toner twice and still messing up prints, it went in the recycle bin). Went back to a good old fashioned Brother black&white pritnter which has been serving me reliably ever since.

Moral of my story: KISS, simple old technology keeps working; fancy stuff breaks down.

kixs wrote on 2024-03-05, 08:58:

What OS will you use for the printer? Old printers means old drivers and newer systems are probably not supported anymore.

Another reason to KISS - PS and PCL are still supported as of Windows 11.

kixs wrote on 2024-03-05, 08:58:

What OS will you use for the printer? Old printers means old drivers and newer systems are probably not supported anymore.

I'm planning to use period correct hardware and OS.

Mechanical state is the most important one, many old things have worn out rollers etc. and start to misbehave due to them. It may be impossible to find the spare parts and any other machine to frankenstein something out of may be in just as bad state and end result may not last all that long still. I have used some older HP laserjets that got replaced simply because of getting worn out, and almost always the newer stuff is nowhere near as lasting except in the giant and very expensive office devices that are meant to pass thousands of pages through them every week... Counters on toners on newer things are a pain too, old stuff you could just fill for as long as the thing physically broke down 🤣.

"vintage" HP laserjets (Laserjet III and Laserjet IV, but nothing newer!!) are built like tanks, and are very likely to still function quite well, with the caveat of needing a maintenance kit for new pickup rollers, or fuser assemblies. (but the good news, is that these workhorse printers CAN get these still!!)

They speak generic PCL 3, so just about any generic PCL 3 driver will work with them just fine. (They ALSO support Epson printer emulation, for that extra vintage feel. If you want to get *EXTRA* retro, PCL contains *ALL* of HPGL, as a code subset, so you can control these printers *THAT* way too!)

wierd_w wrote on 2024-03-05, 09:40:

They speak generic PCL 3, so just about any generic PCL 3 driver will work with them just fine. (They ALSO support Epson printer emulation, for that extra vintage feel. If you want to get *EXTRA* retro, PCL contains *ALL* of HPGL, as a code subset, so you can control these printers *THAT* way too!)

+1

In the 90s, I had owned an HP LaserJet Plus from the 1980s. Windows 3.1 had drivers for it and AutoSketch 2 (DOS) supported HPGL, too.

At the time, I didn't even know about PCL. Just HPGL.
My dad's PenMan turtle plotter had an utility to convert HPGL to PenMan language.

Plotting an AutoSketch drawing involved loading a DXF/SKD file first and then saving it to HPGL, by "printing" into a file.

That file then was being converted by the utility and sent via COPY command to the serial port.

If memory, serves, of course. Speaking under correction, it's been a while. 😅

Btw, didn't the HP DeskJet 500 support HPGL or PCL, too? I vaguely remember so.
It wasn't a dumb GDI Printer yet, at least.

Putting the printer into HPGL mode with the correct PCL sequence instruction, lets you control the printer (very inefficiently) directly from within something like QBASIC, just by writing some simple human-readable words to the LPT port.

You can make polygons, lines, fills, fancy text, and all that snazz, with just a subset of what HPGL offers. You can even make "stipple" patterns-- (laserjet printers have an absurdly small "Pen size" by default though, so the dots are super tiny. This may or may not be desirable, depending on what you are trying to do. If you want to make a program that does custom halftone and moire pattern effect, for instance, it might be fun to have a tiny pen size. But for any actual "use", like making/printing documents, the fill commands are vastly superior.)

It only takes a single instruction sent to the vintage laserjet to put it into that mode (or take it out again). A very small DOS program could be made to do it "with very minimal effort."

HPGL is, however, "Very klunky", due to its nature. It would take a long time to send a full page's data to the printer's built in print buffer. (Unlike a vintage plotter, which is what HPGL is actually FOR, these laser printers aggregate the full page's instructions, then execute them on the "page feed" instruction. Vintage plotters perform the instructions "Immediately". You can push the pen around in fun ways using that ability.)

Brother HL-1440 owner here.
My parents bought it new ~2005 for everyone to use around the house. It's still going strong as of 2023. Only had to change the toner once and the fuser/drum (started printing with lots of lines as of a years ago, so I got a refurbed unit from eBay.) Rollers are still original, but it picks up paper fine and has never jammed - even when I do "manual" double-sided printing (print odd pages first, then flip printed pages and print even numbers.) From what I know, the printer wasn't exactly cheap when my parents bought it back then... but considering it gave us 18 years of almost trouble-free service and is still going strong, I think we can safely say it's paid for itself.

In terms of drivers, I haven't been able to make it work with anything newer than Windows 7 32-bit (for some reason, the generic PCL driver on x64 doesn't seem to work). Then again, I didn't try too hard to troubleshoot this either, since the Win 7 32-bit PC it's connected to still continues to serve fine as a general-purpose office PC.