“The original Hewlett-Packard LaserJet had come out the year before when on Jan. 28, 1985, a month before he would turn 30, Steve Jobs unveiled the LaserWriter at a press event in New York,” Michael Antonoff reports for USA Today. “Both printers used the same Canon engine modified from Canon’s copier technology. Both could turn out 300 dots per inch (dpi) documents at eight pages per minute in gorgeous silence — quite a feat in a time when conversations were regularly cut short by the repetitive impact from an office printer.”
“The obvious difference was the price. The LaserJet was $3,500; the LaserWriter, $7,000,” Antonoff reports. “So, when I asked Jobs why someone should spend twice as much on Apple’s laser printer, he went ballistic. ‘Because HP is brain-dead!’ he exclaimed. ‘It doesn’t do graphics worth beans,’ he went on. ‘The text and fonts it prints are nowhere as beautiful or ambitious as what we’re doing here.'”
Steve was passionate about the LaserWriter and overrode all of the manager’s objections. In this case Steve deserves the reputation he has for changing the world. – John Warnock, former Adobe President
“The LaserWriter was the first desktop printer to incorporate Adobe’s PostScript, a page description language that contained scalable typefaces and supported smoothly drawn graphics. The same file created on a Macintosh computer and proofed on a LaserWriter could be output to a Linotronic 300 phototypesetter at 2,540 dpi, which was commercial quality.,” Antonoff reports. “Apple gets credit for starting the smartphone revolution, but 30 years ago it launched another revolution with the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]