HISTORY OF THE LASER PRINTER

Until the early 1980s, hardly anyone had a personal or office computer; the
few people who did made "hardcopies" (printouts) with dot-matrix printers.
These relatively slow machines made a characteristically horrible screeching
noise because they used a grid of tiny metal needles, pressed against an
inked ribbon, to form the shapes of letters, numbers, and symbols on the
page. They printed each character individually, line by line, at a typical
speed of about 80 characters (one line of text) per second, so a page would
take about a minute to print. Although that sounds slow compared to modern
laser printers, it was a lot faster than most people could bash out letters and
reports with an old-style typewriter (the mechanical or electric keyboardoperated printing machines that were used in offices for writing letters
before affordable computers made them obsolete). You still occasionally see
bills and address labels printed by dot-matrix; you can always tell because
the print is relatively crude and made up of very visible dots. In the mid1980s, as computers became more popular with small businesses, people
wanted machines that could produce letters and reports as quickly as dotmatrix printers but with the same kind of print quality they could get from
old-fashioned typewriters. The door was open for laser printers!
Fortunately, laser-printing technology was already on the way. The first laser
printers had been developed in the late 1960s by Gary Starkweather of
Xerox, who based his work on the photocopiers that had made Xerox such a
successful corporation. By the mid-1970s, Xerox was producing a commercial
laser printera modified photocopier with images drawn by a lasercalled
the Dover, which could knock off about 60 pages a minute (one per second)
and sold for the stupendous sum of $300,000. By the late 1970s, big
computer companies, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Canon, were
competing to develop affordable laser printers, though the machines they

came up with were roughly 23 times bigger than modern onesabout the
same size as very large photocopiers.
Two machines were responsible for making laser printers into mass-market
items. One was the LaserJet, released by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1984 at a
relatively affordable $3495. The other, Apple's LaserWriter, originally cost
almost twice as much ($6995) when it was launched the following year to
accompany the Apple Macintosh computer. Even so, it had a huge impact:
the Macintosh was very easy to use and, with relatively inexpensive desktoppublishing software and a laser printer, it meant almost anyone could turn
out books, magazines, and anything and everything else you could print onto
paper. Xerox might have developed the technology, but it was HP and Apple
who sold it to the world!
In the 1960s, the Xerox Corporation held a dominant position in
the photocopier market. In 1969, Gary Starkweather, who worked in Xerox's
product development department, had the idea of using a laser beam to
"draw" an image of what was to be copied directly onto the copier drum.
After transferring to the recently formed Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox
PARC) in 1971, Starkweather adapted a Xerox 7000 copier to create SLOT
(Scanned Laser Output Terminal). In 1972, Starkweather worked with Butler
Lampson and Ronald Rider to add a control system and character generator,
resulting in a printer called EARS (Ethernet, Alto Research character
generator, Scanned laser output terminal)which later became the Xerox
9700 laser printer.[2][3][4]
The first commercial implementation of a laser printer was the IBM 3800 in
1976. It was designed for data centers, where it replaced line
printers attached to mainframe computers. The IBM 3800 was used for highvolume printing on continuous stationery, and achieved speeds of 215 pages
per minute (ppm), at a resolution of 240 dots per inch (dpi). Over 8,000 of
these printers were sold.[5] The Xerox 9700 was brought to market in 1977.

Unlike the IBM 3800, the Xerox 9700 was not targeted to replace any
particular existing printers; but, it did have limited support for the loading
of fonts. The Xerox 9700 excelled at printing high-value documents on cutsheet paper with varying content (e.g. insurance policies).[5]
In 1979,[6] inspired by the Xerox 9700's commercial success, Japanese
camera and optics company, Canon, developed a low-cost, desktop laser
printer: the Canon LBP-10. Canon then began work on a much-improved print
engine, the Canon CX, resulting in the LBP-CX printer. Lacking experience in
selling to computer users, Canon sought partnerships with three Silicon
Valley companies: Diablo Data Systems (who turned them down), HewlettPackard (HP), and Apple Computer.[7]
The first laser printer designed for office use reached market in 1981:
the Xerox Star 8010. The system used a desktop metaphor that was
unsurpassed in commercial sales, until the Apple Macintosh. Although it was
innovative, the Star workstation was a prohibitively expensive (US$17,000)
system, affordable only to a fraction of the businesses and institutions at
which it was targeted.[8]
The first laser printer intended for mass-market sales was the HP LaserJet,
released in 1984; it used the Canon CX engine, controlled by HP software.
The LaserJet was quickly followed by printers from Brother Industries, IBM,
and others. First-generation machines had large photosensitive drums, of
circumference greater than the loaded paper's length. Once faster-recovery
coatings were developed, the drums could touch the paper multiple times in
a pass, and therefore be smaller in diameter.
In 1985, Apple introduced the LaserWriter (also based on the Canon CX
engine),[9] but used the newly released PostScript page-description language.
Up until this point, each manufacturer used its own proprietary pagedescription language, making the supporting software complex and

expensive. PostScript allowed the use of text, fonts, graphics, images, and
color largely independent of the printer's brand or resolution. PageMaker,
written by Aldus for the Macintosh and LaserWriter, was also released in
1985 and the combination became very popular for desktop publishing.
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Laser printers brought exceptionally fast and high-quality text

printing in multiple fonts on a page, to the business and consumer markets.

No other commonly available printer during this era could also offer this
combination of features.