🚀 go-pugleaf

This is really quite a simple problem.  Appletalk is a 2 wire network.
The Appletalk boxes that cost you $50 from Apple inductively couple
couple both the transmit (two wires) and receive (two wires) to the
single pair in Appletalk.  All you need to do is connect the 
transmit of the laserwriter to the receive on the Mac(512e,plus,II) and
vice versa.  Both the Mac and the laserwriter are wired as DTE,
ie they transmit and receive on the same pairs.  It actually only
takes three wires to make the cable work, use RxD-, TxD- and Gnd.
The pinout for the connectors is below:

        DB-9 (Mac 512, LW LW+)        Din-8 (Mac+,SE,II LW SC,NT,NTX)
        ----------------------	      ------------------------------

          pin       signal               pin    signal
           1         Gnd    		  4       Gnd
           3         Gnd    
           5         TxD-    		  5       RxD-
           9         RxD-	          3       TxD-

This type of cable is generally known as a null modem.
In this case there is no need to include the other modem signals
like DTR or CTS.

Please excuse any terminology errors with regard to the difference
between appletalk and localtalk. I can't keep straight which is 
the software and which is the hardware. You must make sure that
you are using the appletalk port on both the mac(printer port) 
and the laserwriter(db-9 for LW,LW+ and din-8 for LW SC,NT,NTX). 
I guarantee that it works. We have an SE connected to a LW+ and a
MACII connected to an NT in this manner.

Glen