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.

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. With a printer resolution of 300 dpi and printing speed of 8ppm, the LaserWriter printer may have seemed like just another ordinary printer. But at the heart of the LaserWriter printer's raster image processor lay the 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 accountable for feeding paper, image transfer, and fusing the image. Parts from early LaserWriter and HP LaserJet printers are sometimes interchangeable, as they are based on the same print engine, expect for the interface board and formatter and casing.

Unlike HP's PCL and other early printer control languages, PostScript was a complete interpreted 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 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.

The PostScript interpreter in the LaserWriter printer can be used interactively: one can essentially 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Design

The Laser Printer was the first major printer designed by Apple to use the new Snow White design 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 made it a distinctive departure from other office equipment of the time and eventually helped to make Apple products instantly recognizable throughout the world. More importantly it marked a turning point in industrial design where the zero draft design incorporated into the case, allowed the stylish lines to form-fit around the interior mechanisms, keeping it small and sleek enough for any-sized office space.

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