Apple

LaserWriter

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The Apple LaserWriter was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. The combination of the LaserWriter printer with its built-in PostScript interpreter, publishing software Aldus PageMaker, and the GUI-based Macintosh, was an industry-standard configuration at the beginning of the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution.

History

When it was announced in January 1985, the LaserWriter printer was the first laser printer for the Macintosh and an integral part of the newly announced Macintosh Office. The printer had a resolution of 300 dpi and a printing speed of 4ppm, and its raster image processor implemented Adobe PostScript interpreter, a feature that would ultimately transform the landscape of computer desktop publishing.

The original LaserWriter printer used a Canon LBP-CX print engine, which was used by many printer manufacturers at the time. The print engine is responsible for feeding paper, image transfer, and fusing the image. Parts from early LaserWriter and HP LaserJet printers, except for the interface board, formatter, and casing, are sometimes interchangeable as they are based on the same print engine.

Unlike HP’s PCL and other early printer control languages, PostScript is a complete interpreted page description language. PostScript describes fonts in outline form, which allows arbitrary size, rotation, and position. PostScript handles bitmap graphics and vector graphics equally well, allowing any mixture of fonts, bitmaps, and drawing primitives on a single page (limited by the PostScript interpreter’s available RAM). While competing printer control languages offered some of these capabilities, they were limited in their ability to reproduce free-form layouts (as a desktop publishing application might produce).

The PostScript interpreter in the LaserWriter printer can be used interactively: it is possible to connect a serial terminal to the printer and, by typing “executive,” communicate with the printer’s computer. The printer will also display diagnostic error messages on this link (RS-232, 19200 baud, 8 bits, no parity bit, 1 stop bit).

Cost and value

When the LaserWriter was introduced the use of PostScript was expensive. At an introductory price of US$6,995, the LaserWriter was more expensive than non-Postscript laser printers of comparable print speed and quality. The LaserWriter’s high cost was largely due to the extra processing power needed to run the PostScript interpreter. PostScript is a complete programming language and requires a complex software rasterizer program, all implemented in the printer. The LaserWriter had a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, 512KB of workspace RAM, and a 1 MB framebuffer. At introduction, the LaserWriter had the most processing power in Apple’s product line—more than an 8 MHz Macintosh.

Since the cost of a LaserWriter was several times that of a dot-matrix impact printer, some means to share the printer with several Macs was desired. LANs were complex and expensive, so Apple developed its own networking scheme, LocalTalk. Based on the AppleTalk protocol stack, LocalTalk connected the LaserWriter to the Mac over an RS-422 serial port. At 230.4 kbit/s LocalTalk was slower than the Centronics PC parallel interface, but allowed several computers to share a single LaserWriter. PostScript enabled the LaserWriter to print complex pages containing high-resolution bitmap graphics, outline fonts, and vector illustrations. The LaserWriter could print more complex layouts than the HP Laserjet and other non-Postscipt printers. Paired with the program Aldus PageMaker, the LaserWriter gave the layout editor an exact replica of the printed page. The LaserWriter offered a generally faithful proofing tool for preparing documents for quantity publication, and could print smaller quantities directly. The Mac platform quickly gained the favor of the emerging desktop-publishing industry, both low and high, a niche area in which the Mac is still important.

Legacy

Building on the success of the original LaserWriter, Apple developed many further models. Later LaserWriters offered faster printing, higher resolutions, Ethernet connectivity, and eventually color output. To compete, many other laser printer manufacturers licensed Adobe PostScript for inclusion into their own models. Eventually the standardization on Ethernet for connectivity and the ubiquity of PostScript undermined the unique position of Apple’s printers: Macintosh computers functioned equally well with any Postscript printer. After the LaserWriter 8500, Apple discontinued the LaserWriter product line.

Design

The LaserWriter was the first major printer designed by Apple to use the new Snow White design language (not a computer language) created by Frogdesign. It also continued a departure from the beige color that characterized the Apple & Macintosh products to that time by using the same brighter, creamy off-white color first introduced with the Apple IIc and Apple Scribe Printer 8 months earlier. In that regard it and its successors stood out among all of Apple’s Macintosh product offerings until 1987, when Apple adopted a unifying warm gray color they called Platinum across its entire product line, which was to last for over a decade. The innovative look of the LaserWriter was distinctive and marked a turning point in industrial design as the zero draft design incorporated into the case allowed the stylish lines to form-fit around the interior mechanism, keeping it small and sleek.

It was also the first peripheral to use the LocalTalk connector and Apple’s unified AppleTalk Connector Family, designed by Brad Bissell of Frogdesign using Rick Meadows’ Apple Icon Family designs. The connector’s design was used on all of Apple’s peripherals and cable connectors for the next 15 years and influenced the connectors used throughout the industry as a whole.

References

External links

• Driver for Mac OS 8.6.1
• Driver for Linux
• Technical Specifications on Apple.com