LaserWriter
Adam Banks on the printer that changed the publishing industry forever
It was one of Apple’s most significant products, but, as you might guess, the story of the laser printer starts at Xerox. Twenty years after the company sold its first photocopier based on the xerographic process, combining photography with electrostatic printing, Gary Starkweather replaced photography with a laser beam, making it possible to output an image created digitally.
It was 1969, and work would continue at the famous Palo Alto Research Center to develop the technology into commercial products. Xerox, IBM, and others released laser printers for larger offices, and by 1979 the Canon LBP-10 had brought the technology to the desktop. HP’s LaserJet, based on Canon’s CX engine, followed in 1984.
So what was the big deal about the Apple LaserWriter, another CX printer that arrived the following year? Not the hardware, but the software. Adobe’s PostScript page description language – created by two more PARC alumni, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke – abstracted typesetting and graphics from the mechanics of printing, setting page layout free.
It was Steve Jobs who saw the potential of this and negotiated to license the software. Together with Aldus PageMaker – developed by magazine editor Paul Brainerd to let users design pages visually – the combination of the Macintosh and LaserWriter became the first “desktop publishing” platform, a term that Brainerd coined.
Equipped with AppleTalk networking so that the cost could be spread across a workgroup, the LaserWriter sold for $6,995, considerably more than its rivals. Again, it was PostScript that made the difference. Generating the raw code was challenge enough for the still-young Macintosh and the PageMaker package, but rasterizing the resolution-independent page description for 300dpi output – over eight million dots per page – required even more processing power. With its 12MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, the LaserWriter thus became the fastest computer Apple had sold.