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Thewikifox/sandbox3
Presentazione	March 1, 1985
Dismissione	February 1, 1988
Processore	Motorola 68000
Frequenza	12 MHz
RAM minima	1.5 MB
RAM Massima	1.5 MB
Slot RAM	{{{slotram}}}
ROM	512 kB
Porte	Serial, LocalTalk
Tipologia	Laser
Colori	1
DPI	300
Velocità	8 Pages Per Minute
Linguaggio	{{{linguaggio}}}
Potenza	760 Watts Watt
Peso	77 lb Kg
Dimensione	A L P (H × W × D) 11.5 × 18.5 × 16.2 in cm

La LaserWriter è stata una stampante laser che utilizzava come linguaggio di descrizione di pagina il PostScript immessa sul mercato dalla Apple nel 1985. È stata una delle prime stampanti laser disponibili sul mercato. Assieme al programma PageMaker, la LaserWriter ha avuto un ruolo fondamentale nell'avvio della rivoluzione del desktop publishing. La stampante era progettata per essere utilizzata in congiunzione con un Macintosh; Apple non ha mai rilasciato driver per altri computer.

Storia

Sviluppo della stampa laser

L'inizio dello sviluppo della stampa laser risale al 1969 ed al lavoro di Gary Starkweather alla Xerox, che portò alla produzione della Xerox 9700 nel 1977. Parallelamente, l'IBM portò avanti la ricerca nel settore, arrivando nel 1976 all'elaborazione del sistema IBM 3800.

Intorno alla metà degli anni 70 anche la Canon cominciò ad investire sulla produzione di stampanti laser, avviando una partnership con la Hewlett-Packard; così, dieci anni dopo, fu prodotta la HP 2680. Il primo modello desktop di stampante laser fu introdotto dalla HP nel 1983 e lanciato sul mercato al prezzo di 12800 $, ma le vendite furono pochissime. Sempre nel 1983 la Canon mise a punto la LPB-CX, una stampante laser dotata di un diodo laser che stampava con una risoluzione di 300dpi. Nel 1984 la HP lanciò sul mercato la prima stampante laser commerciale basata sulla LBP-CX: la HP LaserJet.

Lo sviluppo in casa Apple

Steve Jobs vide la LPB-CX mentre trattava per delle forniture di floppy disk da 3.5" per l'Apple Macintosh. Nel frattempo [[John

Steve Jobs had seen the LPB-CX while negotiating for supplies of 3.5" floppy disk drives for the upcoming Apple Macintosh computer. Meanwhile, John Warnock had left Xerox to found Adobe Systems in order to commercialize PostScript in a laser printer they intended to market. Jobs was aware of Warnock's efforts, and on his return to California he started working on convincing Warnock to allow Apple to license PostScript for a new printer that Apple would sell. Negotiations between Apple and Adobe over the use of Postscript began in 1983 and an agreement was reached in December 1983, one month before Macintosh was announced. Jobs eventually arranged for Apple to buy $2.5 million in Adobe stock.

At about the same time, Jonathan Seybold (John W's son) introduced Paul Brainerd to Apple, where he learned of Apple's laser printer efforts and saw the potential for a new program using the Mac's GUI to produce PostScript output for the new printer. Arranging his own funding through a venture capital firm, Brainerd formed Aldus and began development of what would become PageMaker. The VC coined the term "desktop publishing" during this time.

Rilascio

The LaserWriter was announced at Apple's annual shareholder meeting on January 23, 1985, the same day Aldus announced PageMaker. Shipments began in March 1985 at the retail price of US$ 6,995, significantly more than the HP model. However, the LaserWriter featured AppleTalk support that allowed the printer to be shared among as many as sixteen Macs, meaning that its per-user price could fall to under $450, far less expensive than HP's less-advanced model.

The combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript, PageMaker and the Mac's GUI and built-in AppleTalk networking would ultimately transform the landscape of computer desktop publishing. At the time, Apple planned to release a suite of AppleTalk products as part of the Macintosh Office, with the LaserWriter being only the first component.

While competing printers and their associated control languages offered some of the capabilities of PostScript, they were limited in their ability to reproduce free-form layouts (as a desktop publishing application might produce), use outline fonts, or offer the level of detail and control over the page layout. HP's own LaserJet was driven by a simple page description language running on the host computer, known as Printer Command Language, or PCL. The version for the LaserJet, PCL4, was adapted from earlier inkjet printers with the addition of downloadable bitmapped fonts. It lacked the power and flexibility of PostScript until several upgrades provided some level of parity. It was some time before similar products became available on other platforms, by which time the Mac had ridden the desktop publishing market to success.

Caratteristiche

Hardware

PostScript is a complete programming language that has to be run in a suitable interpreter and then sent to a software rasterizer program, all inside the printer. To support this, the LaserWriter featured a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, 512 kB of workspace RAM, and a 1 MB frame buffer. At introduction, the LaserWriter had the most processing power in Apple’s product line—more than the 8 MHz Macintosh. As a result, the LaserWriter was also one of Apple's most expensive offerings.

Networking

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-Postscript 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, a market in which the Mac is still important.

Design

The LaserWriter 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 and 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 LaserWriter was also the first peripheral to use the LocalTalk connector and Apple’s unified round AppleTalk Connector Family, which allowed any variety of mechanical networking systems to be plugged into the ports on the computers or printers. A common solution was the 3rd party PhoneNet which used conventional telephone cables for networking.

Modelli

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 in the Color LaserWriter. 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 in 1997.

LaserWriter II

In 1988, to address the need for both an affordable printer and a professional printer, the LaserWriter II was designed to allow for complete replacement of the computer circuit board that operates the printer. Across all the different models, the print engine was the same.

• For low-end users, there was the LaserWriter II SC, a host-based QuickDraw printer connected via SCSI that did not use PostScript and did not require a license from Adobe. It had two SCSI ports to allow daisy-chaining of the printer with other SCSI devices such as hard drives. It did not support AppleTalk.
• For midrange users, the LaserWriter II NT provided PostScript support and AppleTalk networking.
• For high-end users, the LaserWriter II NTX also included a SCSI controller for storage of printer fonts on a hard drive dedicated for use by the printer.

Three years later in 1991, two updated versions of the LaserWriter II were produced.

• The LaserWriter IIf had a faster processor than the IINTX, a newer version of PostScript and also HP PCL, and included the SCSI interface for font storage on an external hard drive
• The LaserWriter IIg had the capabilities of the IIf, and was also the first LaserWriter with a built-in Ethernet network interface.