Gary Starkweather, Inventor of the Laser Printer, Dies At 81 (nytimes.com) 44
Gary Starkweather, engineer and inventor of the first laser printer, died on December 26 at the age of 81. The New York Times reports: Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 -- several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings -- when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another. He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he had a better idea: Rather than sending grainy images of paper documents from place to place, what if he used the precision of a laser to print more refined images straight from a computer? "What you have to do is not just look at the marble," he said in a talk at the University of South Florida in 2017. "You have to see the angel in the marble."
Because his idea ventured away from the company's core business, copiers, his boss hated it. At one point Mr. Starkweather was told that if he did not stop working on the project, his entire team would be laid off. "If you have a good idea, you can bet someone else doesn't think it's good," Mr. Starkweather would say in 1997 in a lecture for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. But he soon finagled a move to the company's new research lab in Northern California, where a group of visionaries was developing what would become the most important digital technologies of the next three decades, including the personal computer as it is known today. At the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, Mr. Starkweather built the first working laser printer in 1971 in less than nine months. By the 1990s, it was a staple of offices around the world. By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well.
Because his idea ventured away from the company's core business, copiers, his boss hated it. At one point Mr. Starkweather was told that if he did not stop working on the project, his entire team would be laid off. "If you have a good idea, you can bet someone else doesn't think it's good," Mr. Starkweather would say in 1997 in a lecture for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. But he soon finagled a move to the company's new research lab in Northern California, where a group of visionaries was developing what would become the most important digital technologies of the next three decades, including the personal computer as it is known today. At the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, Mr. Starkweather built the first working laser printer in 1971 in less than nine months. By the 1990s, it was a staple of offices around the world. By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well.
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At the time Xerox had problems with competition from new players in the photocopier market (especially at the low end and IIRC from the Japanese) that they had to deal with and they were also being investigated by the US government for anti-trust over whether they were using their dominance in the photocopier market to push competitors out.
So they were busy trying to figure out how to beat the new players without being hit by the government trust-busters while also being concerned that any new product they
I hear PARC's freedom was partly due to accounting (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethernet, laser printer, oh what they could have done..
I hear much of PARC's freedom to innovate was a result of an accounting quirk at Xerox. Story goes:
Around the time of the founding of PARC, Xerox' copiers were still using switches and custom relay logic for the control panel and 'brains'. Mandated to design a control panel/brain for the next model, the PARCies built one that incorporated one of those new-fangled microprocessor chips and built the logic as software rather than complex hardware.
That turned out to be cheaper. A LOT cheaper. Also more reliable. And you could fix bugs or build more versions quickly by reprogramming it and maybe redoing the board layout a bit.
Due to Xerox's accounting practices, PARC was credited with a fraction of the cost savings of this design for years. So they could spend money like water on additional research and still show up on paper as "profitable".
Then (like Bell Labs before them) they did a lot of additional, often basic, research and design. And (low and behold) some of THAT turned out to be (really) profitable, too. Xerox prospered and their management continued to let PARC have its head (rather than smother the goose that kept laying the occasional golden egg).
(Bell Labs' freedom and blazing success had a similar origin in a very different accounting oddity. But that's another story.)
(Also: Another Xerox accounting quirk caused them to decide to fold their mainframe business {because it looked like it was losing when it was actually quite profitable} and file a disastrous antitrust suit against IBM {which understood the accounting issues and went "Ho ho ho look at this!" before the judge.} But that's yet a third story.)
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Funeral request (Score:2, Interesting)
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And his headstone will read "PC LOAD LETTER".
Mr Starkweather w ll be missed.. (Score:4, Funny)
Before he came along, pr nting was a messy affair
involving cartridges that h d a habit of drying out
between uses, unless use s were careful to make
sure to print a significant n mber of pages daily.
Although laser printers we e not without problems
of their own, they were ce tainly less trouble to
maintain.
You just had to watch clo ely for end of cartridge.
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Before he came along, pr nting was a messy affair
involving cartridges that h d a habit of drying out
between uses, unless use s were careful to make
sure to print a significant n mber of pages daily.
Although laser printers we e not without problems
of their own, they were ce tainly less trouble to
maintain.
You just had to watch clo ely for end of cartridge.
I still have happy memories of line printers and green bar paper. Those babies could churn.
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I still have happy memories of line printers and green bar paper. Those babies could churn.
I take it you never had to fix those printers when their tractors got out of alignment or anything else went wrong with their complicated electromechanical bodies.
I have vivid memories of computer room floors submerged in masses of wrecked paper churned out and flung across the room.
Since people normally handle written material page by page, there is much to be said for a printer that accepts stacks of blank pages and produces stacks of printed pages.
Re:Mr Starkweather w ll be missed.. (Score:5, Informative)
Inkjet vs. laser printer (Score:3)
Per Wikipedia, inkjet printers were invented in the late 1970's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkjet_printing [wikipedia.org]
When I was in college (early 80's), we had chain printers like you describe that we could use for free, but the campus did also have one "laser phototypesetter" (i.e. laser printer, but it was a big expensive thing... we could send print jobs to it if we were willing to pay a per-page charge, but we certainly never got to touch it).
I believe the first commercial inkjet printer was released in 1984...
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Even laser consumables are kinda expensive, in that these days a full set of colour cartridges often exceeds the purchase cost of the printer. Sure the new ones are higher capacity but people don't think like that, they go out and buy a new printer.
I doubt that the amount of toner in those things justifies the high price, considering how cheap the raw toner in a bottle is. In other words it's the same business model as inkjets, except that people are more willing to pay 50 quid for a set of ink carts than 1
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A dot matrix is different than a line printer. Imagine a teletype or an electric typewriter, physically smashing a metal character stamp against an ink ribbon.
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There are dot matrix printers that are sort of like line printers in the sense that they print a whole line of dots at a time (sort of - I think the one that I used in the late 70's actually shuttled pins back and forth and each "pin" covered six or so "dot columns"). Printronix still makes some such as this one [printronix.com] - part of a family they call "line matrix printers".
We called them "line printers" - mostly because they printed one line of dots rather than characters at a time - although I felt a bit odd calling
Re:Mr Starkweather w ll be missed.. (Score:4, Informative)
That is called a comb printer. it has a pin per character position along the line. these pins shuffle across the width of a character. Then the paper advances by one dot pitch. The pins poked a wide inked ribbon which was skewed so that the width of the paper/pin comb mapped to the width of the ribbon, advancing about 1/2 pin pitch per pin strike. These were at peak popularity in the late 1980's. More expensive than dot matrix and comparable to inkjets of the day, running costs were low, and print usually quality lower.
There were also drum printers - which had a huge drum with an alphabet per character pitch, and a hammer that struck the paper from behind when the correct character was (approximately) in front. These are instantly recognizable from chain printers because the characters tend to wobble up and down - which is not a failure mode the general public can miss. They normally print a line per rotation of the drum, and have print speeds in the thousands of lines per minute. These were widely used in the early 1960's. They are probably still used where volume matters more than quality, and no one has to listen to the din they make.
For high quality print, you used an IBM Golf-ball printer: 10 chars per second, and but choice of character set - very popular for personalised begging letters from charities. But a room full of them was noisier than hell.
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There are also band line printers. A flexible continuous metal band/belt with the characters embossed on it passed in front of an array of hammers, one per character position with each hammer firing at the time the necessary character passed under it. You could almost always tell if something was printed on a drum or band line printer by the (mis)alignment that was nearly always present to some degree. With these, reducing the size of the character set (just upper case band vs upper and lower band mainly as
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There's the "shuttle matrix" type (IBM 5224) where an array of solenoids was moved back and forth across the paper, firing away. They were "dot" printers, but fast because the array could print entire characters on each pass, rather than building up a character line-by-line - so an entire line of text was printed per pass. Not as fast as the pure band printers but they could print extended character sets and fonts whereas the pure band printer could only print what characters were embossed in the band. An I
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I used to rewind the ribbons in my dot matrix and re-use them 4-5 times. After a while I turned on the overtype mode so that every character was printed 2 or even 4 times (overtype+bold).
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One thing you could do with the old dot matrix were those el cheapo banners we used to have in schools and such. I'm half surprised there is not some common option to allow fanfold or roll paper in an inkjet or laser, but then I haven't really looked. An epson ecotank might be worth it, if you could print on wallpaper grade say 11" wide roll paper, that you could cover a wall with.
They do exist but are much bigger and in print shops usually or an architects office it would be nice to get a smaller consumer version.
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The big issue is internal memory of the printer.
The old dot matrix printers protocol could only take a single line of data at most, usually only 80 bytes. All the rasterization was done on the host computer. If you wanted to print graphics quickly you had to be able to generate and feed the data as fast as the printer head used it. I spent a lot of time in my youth getting an Atari 800 to spit out graphics to an Epson MX-80.
A laser printer does the rasterization internally, if you wanted a 20 page long b
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I had the honor of meeting Gary back in the 1990s. Nice guy, solid engineer. He will be missed for sure.
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... and the code to complete the laser printer... (Score:5, Interesting)
PostScript! I spent many an hour working to get PostScript, generated on an IBM Mainframe, outputted in EBCDIC to translate into ASCII and print on one of our Xerox printers. We had a UNIX box that handled the PostScript --> LCDS conversion, or you could throw this big switch and the printer was bus & tag attached to the MF for more traditional output.
It really doesn't surprise me the boneheaded decision by Xerox higher-ups to regress with copiers when printing was the way forward. Not unlike Kodak, which pretty much invented digital photography and then doubled-down on film.
The DocuTech line of printers (starting with the 135) were total work-horses. Run those f*ckers all day long and they wouldn't skip a beat! Then someone at Xerox decided that the well debugged innards needed a refresh and out came the Nuvera pieces of crap. Couldn't print more than 5 minutes before a paper jam. Eventually they fixed them - once we threatened to push them off the loading dock and Xerox could pick up the pieces out of the trailer pit.
One of the interesting things about Xerox printers - they were a White on Black engine, where everyone else, to get around the Xerox patents, were a Black on White engine. White on Black charges the imaging belt (the DocuTech's had a belt, not a drum) to print a completely black page. The laser knocks out the charge producing white areas. HP (based on Canon engine), Kodak, Simmons/IBM/Oce, etc. all used a Black on White engine - Laser only charges where toner will go.
RIP Gary - You did good! Even if your bosses were idiots.
Ubiquitous in homes by 2000? (Score:2)
By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well
That's not true, at least not in my area (Connecticut, US). In 2000 most homes still had inkjets and folks were still dealing with clogged cartridges and how to refill them. I still don't think they're quite ubiquitous today, but certainly way more common. I have a Brother color laser from 2009 that is still running beautifully, although weighs about 2 tons.
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Inkjet ($50) + a packet of cartridges ($200) is about the same cost as a decent home Color Laser.
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I was thinking that. I bought a basic laser printer second hand in 2001 or 2002 and thought I was really lucky to find it. A new one would have cost more than I'd spent in total on computers over the previous decade (three Amigas and a Pentium, all second hand). Everyone else I knew had inkjets.
It's a plot (Score:1)