Dragonfly wrote
Apple produced the first ever printer to use a laser, a spinning mirror, and
electrostatically charged toner to produce images on standard office paper. That is
the invention of the laser printer. (I guess some credit should go to Adobe for
creating a page description language and interpreter that could provide a raster
image fast enough for the laser and at high enough quality to make using a laser
relevant.)
That is not correct.
In the late '70s, Gary Starkweather was the first to convert an electrophotographic copier for use as a laser printer when he was at Xerox PARC (Sproul did the software). In 1987 or 1988, Gary moved to Apple and a year or two ago, moved to Microsoft. Gary had started his graduate studies in Nuclear Physics, but the world was fortunate that he switched to Optics before long :-).
PARC never did commercialise the printers, but a few of the Xerox Dover printers ended up in universities (Stanford, CMU and MIT). If memory serves, they were priced at about $190K a piece. The controller for the Dover was the Xerox Alto computer.
By the time Apple came out with the LaserWriter, folks like Hewlett Packard, Xerox, Imagen and QMS were already selling laser printers into the computer market for almost half a dozen years.
However, these early printers had proprietary "languages" (e.g. PCL, imPRESS, QUIC). The Dover had a language called PRESS. What the LaserWriter is known for is for being the first to offer PostScript (Adobe). That, coupled with Aldus Pagemaker running on Macintosh, created the Desktop Publishing paradigm.
The LaserWriter also used the Canon printing mechanism (LBP-CX) that was first to incorporate a removable toner/drum cartridge that we all take for granted today. To be historically accurate, HP had shipped an LBP-CX based printer about a year before the LaserWriter, and Imagen shipped theirs about half a year before Apple. But none of those printers had PostScript.
Back in those days, PostScript offered two things that none of the other printer languages did - scalable fonts and halftoned images.
Microsoft dabbled in PostScript printing for a while in the late '80s by buying the Bauer Group and its PostScript clone, which Microsoft renamed TrueImage. At about the same time, it acquired the TrueType font technology from Apple. I wonder how many people today would remember that Macintosh users had TrueType for many years before Microsoft users could enjoy the same technology. A couple of years later, Microsoft dropped TrueImage, but Apple TrueType is still being used in Windows.
Regards,
Kok Chen |
