While the Ethernet was being developed, so was another crucial element in the office of the future: the laser printer. After all, what use was a screen that could show documents in multiple type styles and a network that could transmit them from place to place without some means of printing them efficiently?
The idea for the laser printer came to PARC from Xerox’s Webster, N.Y., research laboratory—along with its proponent, Gary Starkweather. He had the idea of using a laser to paint information, in digital form, onto the drum or belt of a copying machine, then-research vice president Goldman recalled. Starkweather reported to the vice president of the Business Products Group for Advanced Development, George White.
“George White came to me,” said Goldman, “and said, ‘Look, Jack, I got a terrific guy named Gary Starkweather doing some exciting things on translating visual information to print by a laser, using a Xerox machine, of course. What an ideal concept that would be for Xerox. But I don’t think he’s going to thrive in Rochester; nobody’s going to listen to him, they’re not going to do anything that far advanced. Why don’t you take him out to your new lab in Palo Alto?’ “
Newly appointed PARC manager Pake jumped at the opportunity. Starkweather and a few other researchers from Rochester were transferred to Palo Alto and started PARC’s Optical Science Laboratory. The first laser printer, EARS (Ethernet-Alto-Research character generator-Scanning laser output terminal), built by Starkweather and Ron Rider, began printing documents that were generated by Altos and sent to it via Ethernet in 1973.
EARS wasn’t perfect, Thornburg said. It had a dynamic character generator that would create new patterns for characters and graphics as they came in. If a page had no uppercase Qs in it, the character generator would economize on internal memory by not generating a pattern for a capital “Q.” But if a page contained a very complex picture, the character generator would run out of space for patterns; “there were certain levels of complexity in drawings that couldn’t be printed,” Thornburg recalled.
Even with these drawbacks, the laser printer was still an enormous advance over the line printers, teletypes, and facsimile printers that were available at the time, and Goldman pushed to have it commercialized as quickly as possible. But Xerox resisted. In fact, a sore point throughout PARC’s history has been the parent organization’s seeming inability to exploit the developments that researchers made.
In 1972, when Starkweather built his first prototype, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in an effort to spur the technology, put out a request for bids for five laser printers. But Goldman was unable to convince the executive to whom Xerox’s Electro-Optical Systems division reported (whose background was accounting and finance) to allow a bid. The reason: Xerox might have lost $150 000 over the life of the contract if the laser printers needed repair as often as the copiers on which they were based, even though initial evidence showed that printing caused far less wear and tear than copying.
In 1974 the laser printer first became available outside PARC when a small group of PARC researchers under John Ellenby—who built the Alto II, a production-line version of the Alto, and who is now vice president of development at Grid Systems Corp., Mountain View, Calif.—began buying used copiers from Xerox’s copier division and installing laser heads in them. The resulting printers, known as Dovers, were distributed within Xerox and to universities. Sutherland estimated that several dozen were built.
“They stripped out all the optics and turned them back to the copier division for credit,” he recalled. Even today, he said, he receives laser-printed documents from universities in which he can recognize the Dover typefaces.
Also in 1974, the Product Review Committee at Xerox head quarters in Rochester, N.Y., was finally coming to a decision about what kind of computer printer the company should manufacture. “A bunch of horse’s asses who don’t know anything about technology were making the decision, and it looked to me, sitting a week before the election, that it was going toward CRT technology,’’ said Goldman. (Another group at Xerox had developed a printing system whereby text displayed on a special cathode ray tube would be focused on a copier drum and printed.) “It was Monday night. I commandeered a plane,’’ Goldman recalled. “I took the planning vice president and the marketing vice president by the ear, and I said, ‘You two guys are coming with me. Clear your Tuesday calendars. You are coming with me to PARC tonight. We’ll be back for the 8:30 meeting on Wednesday morning.’ We left around 7:00 p.m., got to California at I:00, which is only 10:00 their time, and the guys at PARC, bless their souls, did a beautiful presentation showing what the laser printer could do.
“If you’re dealing with marketing or planning people, make them kick the tires. All the charts and all the slides aren’t worth a damn,” Goldman said.
From a purely economic standpoint, Xerox’s investment in PARC for its first decade was returned with interest by the profits from the laser printer.
The committee opted to go with laser technology, but there were delays. “They wouldn’t let us get them out on 7000s,” Goldman said, referring to the old-model printer that Ellenby’s group had used as a base. “Instead they insisted on going with new 9000 Series, which didn’t come out until 1977.”
From a purely economic standpoint, Xerox’s investment in PARC for its first decade was returned with interest by the profits from the laser printer. This is perhaps ironic, since one vision of the office of the future was that it would be paperless.
“I think PARC has generated more paper than any other office by far, because at the press of a button you can print 30 copies of any report,” observed Douglas Fairbairn, a former PARC technician and now vice president for user-designed technology at VLSI Technology Inc. “If the report is 30 pages long, that’s 1000 pages, but it still takes only a few minutes. Then you say, ‘I guess I wanted that picture on the other page.’ That’s another 1000 pages.”
Reference: https://ift.tt/vFTO9hV
No comments:
Post a Comment