Connecting a parallel printer to a Mac Pro

You have a few problems, the connection and the drivers....even if you get it connected, your Mac wont know how to talk to it as HP does not have USB drivers for a Laserjet 5MP....The only way you may get it to work is if you have the Postscript option for the 5MP and get a use a generic postscript driver. For a cable you will need a USB to Mac serial cable. The postscript option adds a Mac serial port. The problem is if you dont have the potscript option, HP no longer makes it, and it may not be cost effective being laser printers are not that expensive anymore. You may spend $300+ on getting it to work, when a new Mac Pro friendly printer may be less.

i have an old hp laserjet (4l i think) and it works fine with a belkin usb-parallel cable and the gutenprint drivers. the 4l is a postscript compatible printer, but gutenprint doesnt treat it as such, yet it still works. if you wanna give the drivers a go you can get them here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15970

I have a HP Laserjet 4500 which only had a parallel port. After talking to the HP people we decided to get a network card for the HP (made by HP). It's called Jet Direct. We installed it in the Laserjet and then by ethernet cable into our router.

I wasn't sure that was the way I wanted to go, but now all of our laptops and all of our computers that have Airport can use the HP Laserjet printer wirelessly. So it's really a great solution for us.

MacPro 2.66ghz, Macbook Pro, Macbook, PowerMac G5 Dual Cores Mac OS X (10.4.8)

I use the same printer, an old reliable hp 5mp as one of our network printers. We use a simple print server that supports two USB 2.0 ports and a single Parallel port. The print server then shows up on our network, either using IP Printing, Appletalk, or Bonjour, allowing it to be accessible to both Macs and PC's on our network.

Even if you do not have a network, adding the print server would easily take care of your problems.

We use the Trendnet TE100- P21 available from many sources. It works well and is fairly easy to set up. The only slight gotya, is the print server is preconfigured for an IP address of 192.168.0.1 which may nee to be changed for the most common ip subnets used in home networks. Trendnet included a utility for changing the assigned IP, but it is a windows only app. Of course you can use bootcamp, parallel, or a PC to make the initial IP change, then after that everything can be managed from a web interface on your Mac.

Tom N