The Apple LaserWriter was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. The combination of the LaserWriter printer, publishing software Aldus PageMaker, and the GUI-based Macintosh, is considered by some to have sparked the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution. The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor from Motorola. ... A male DE-9 connector used for a serial port on a PC style computer. ... LocalTalk is a particular implementation of the physical layer of the AppleTalk networking system from Apple Computer. ... 1993 Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 laser printer A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles accessible from a disambiguation page. ... 1993 Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 laser printer A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. ... Aldus Corporation (named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius) was the inventor of the groundbreaking PageMaker software for the Apple Macintosh, a program that is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing (DTP) field. ... PageMaker was the first desktop publishing program, introduced in 1985 by Aldus Corporation, initially for the Apple Macintosh but soon after also for the PC. It relies on Adobe Systems PostScript page description language. ... A graphical user interface (or GUI, often pronounced gooey), is a particular case of user interface for interacting with a computer which employs graphical images and widgets in addition to text to represent the information and actions available to the user. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... Apple Pages being used with one of the included templates Desktop publishing (also known as DTP) combines a personal computer and page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local economical multifunction peripheral output and distribution. ...

History

When it was introduced in late 1985, the LaserWriter was the first laser printer for the Macintosh. With a printer resolution of 300 dpi and printing speed of 8ppm, the LaserWriter may have seemed like just another ordinary printer. But at the heart of the Laserwriter's raster image processor lay the Adobe PostScript interpreter, a feature that would ultimately transform the landscape of computer desktop publishing. 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of printing resolution, in particular the number of individual dots of ink a printer or toner can produce within a linear one-inch space. ... PostScript (PS) is a page description language and programming language used primarily in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. ... An interpreter is a computer program that executes other programs. ...

The original LaserWriter used a Canon LBP-CX print engine [1], 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 are sometimes interchangeable, as they were often based on the same print engine. Canon Inc. ...

Unlike HP's PCL and other early printer control languages, PostScript was a complete page description language. PostScript described fonts in outline form, an attribute allowing arbitrary size, rotation, and position. PostScript handled 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 printers offered some of these capabilities, they were limited in their ability to reproduce free-form layouts (as a desktop publishing application might produce). The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... PCL (Printer Command Language) was developed by HP as a printer protocol that has become a de facto industry standard. ... A page description language (PDL) is a language that describes the contents of a printed page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap. ... Example showing effect of vector graphics on ppm scale: (a) original vector-based illustration; (b) illustration magnified 8x as a vector image; (c) illustration magnified 8x as a raster image. ...

The use of PostScript did not come cheap. At an introductory price of US$6,995, the LaserWriter was more expensive than PC 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. As it was a complete programming language, PostScript came saddled with the overhead of a complex software rasterizer program (running inside the printer). Powering the LaserWriter was 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 8MHz Macintosh. ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Indian Ocean Territory[1], the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 2. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor from Motorola. ... Die of an Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor (actual size: 12×6. ... MegaHertz (MHz) is the name given to one million (106) Hertz, a measure of frequency. ... Look up RAM, Ram, ram in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Since the price of a single LaserWriter cost many times that of a dot-matrix impact printer, some means to share the printer with several Macs was desired. LANs were not yet widespread, being both 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 250 kbit/s, LocalTalk was slower than the Centronics PC parallel interface, but offered the advantage of sharing a single LaserWriter over multiple Macs. Local area network scheme A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a local area, like a home, office, or group of buildings[1]. Current LANs are most likely to be based on switched IEEE 802. ... LocalTalk is a particular implementation of the physical layer of the AppleTalk networking system from Apple Computer. ... AppleTalk is a proprietary suite of protocols developed by Apple Computer for computer networking. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with communications protocol. ... EIA-422 (formerly RS-422) is a serial data communication protocol which specifies 4-wire, full-duplex, differential line, multi-drop communications. ... A kilobit is a unit of information storage, abbreviated kbit or sometimes kb. ... Look up second in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The built-in ability to function in workgroups greatly enhanced the LaserWriter's value proposition. Connectivity, versatility, and WYSIWYG laser quality formed a winning combination in the LaserWriter. Apple's gamble with PostScript paid off handsomely. PostScript enabled the LaserWriter to print complex pages containing high-resolution bitmap graphics, outline fonts, and vector illustrations. Compared to the HP Laserjet and other PCL printers, the LaserWriter could print more complex layouts. Paired with the program Aldus PageMaker, the LaserWriter gave the layout editor an exact replica of the printed page. For high-volume publications, the LaserWriter offered the perfect proofing tool. For the low-volume desktop publisher, the LaserWriter could serve as the master copy. The Mac platform quickly gained the favor of the emerging desktop-publishing industry, both low and high, a niche area the Mac retains importance to this day. WYSIWYG (IPA Pronunciation [] or []), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ... Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ... ... HP LaserJet first model, 1984 LaserJet is the brand name used by the American computer company Hewlett Packard (HP) for their line of dry electrophotographic (DEP) laser printers. ...

Millions of LaserWriter units were eventually sold, and it is often credited as having saved the Macintosh platform and the Apple company. Building on the success of the original LaserWriter, Apple developed many successive 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. Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of printing resolution, in particular the number of individual dots of ink a printer or toner can produce within a linear one-inch space. ... Ethernet is a large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ...

Eventually, the standardization on Ethernet and PostScript as a means for connecting to and controlling laser printers rendered Apple's printers superfluous. The Mac platform functioned equally well with any non-Apple Postscript printer. After the LaserWriter 8500, Apple discontinued the Laserwriter product line. The LaserWriter 8500 is a laser printer manufactured and sold by Apple. ...

Trivia

The LaserWriter has an interactive PostScript interpreter: one can actually 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.) An interpreter is a computer program that executes other programs. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... In telecommunications and electronics, baud (pronounced , unit symbol Bd), is a measure of the symbol rate; that is, the number of distinct symbol changes (signalling events) made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal. ... BITS may have any of the following meanings: In computer science, bits are binary digits, which may each have the value one or zero. ... A parity bit is a binary digit that indicates whether the number of bits with value of one in a given set of bits is even or odd. ... Asynchronous start-stop describes an asynchronous transmission protocol in which a start signal is sent prior to each code symbol and a stop signal is sent after each code symbol. ...

Older LaserWriters have a spring-loaded tray to feed paper. It is designed to move up a little when a page feeds, but is inherently flawed because this makes the printer feed 2 or 3 pages at a time occasionally, resulting in a jam.

External links

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