Quote:
|
Originally Posted by OICURMT;760176[URL
... Laser Printing in 1970... anyone remember that?
|
The work that was done at PARC for the laser printer used with the Xerox Star
has some other interesting Silicon Valley connections including with Apple.
A couple of guys who worked at Xerox PARC, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock,
helped create a page description language called InterPress.
Geschke and Warnock left PARC in late 1982 to form a little company some readers
of this forum may have heard of called Adobe Systems.
At Adobe, they used their experience from having worked on InterPress and developed
the PostScript page description language which they released around 1984.
In 1985, Apple released the LaserWriter printer which internally had an Adobe
developed controller running an Adobe PostScript interpreter. The print engine
was the Canon CX.
There were already other laser printers on the market before the LaserWriter.
Though the LaserWriter assisted in popularizing PostScript and helped grow the
fortunes of Adobe, the printer itself was more expensive and slower at rendering
printed pages than many other non-PostScript printers based on the Canon CX.
The LaserWriter could communicate with Macs over an RS-422 LocalTalk network
which ran a protocol stack that Apple called AppleTalk. The author of this post
later worked designing laser printer controllers for more than a decade for OEM
customers such as Fuji-Xerox. One of the solutions we helped provide for these
OEM's was LocalTalk connectivity which included our own AppleTalk protocol
stack. By design, AppleTalk was a very clunky, very slow protocol and one had
visions of it being designed by a committee.
HP took the same Canon CX engine that Apple had used in the LaserWriter but
their LaserJet offering propelled HP to be the world's largest printer company.