Printer opinion: Seems like only yesterday

Unlike some latter day IT experts your humble correspondent had by then already been immersed in the world of IT for simply ages. Well, for three years or so, but let’s not get picky. You had to be there – it’s a bit like a Led Zeppelin concert, and we were all there right?

Yes, yes, even back then laser printers weren’t as noisy as a Led Zeppelin concert but you just about needed to be a rock star to be able to afford one of the things. Hmm. New car or laser printer? Hmm. The decision was easier for an entire university department, so we rushed over to the one that had the biggest budget to take a look at their shiny new toy. They needed a big budget because you also needed an Apple Macintosh to talk to this new laser printer.

Gadzooks! The thing spat out pages that looked just like a magazine! Now you probably thought I was going to say the pages looked like they’d been photocopied from a magazine, but no, they were much, much better than that.

Thirty years ago photocopiers weren’t spitting out near perfect copies. But this LaserWriter produced pristine pages – don’t forget this was before inkjet printers did anything other than behave like super quiet dot matrix printers.
Now there’s a term many would never have heard of – or believe. Dot matrix. Yes folks, that was the way things were printed thirty years ago, if you wanted it done in real time. There were also ‘golf ball’ and ‘daisy wheel’ printers, which used old typewriter technology to produce decent pages of text but they took literally hours to get through an average document. The laser was unbelievably fast and unbelievably good, and it outlasted all the other technologies except inkjet.

And inkjet was a technology back then which nobody really thought was going any place except for the library where its quiet nature appealed. Of course that was before we all demanded colour and the humble inkjet proved itself more than capable of meeting that challenge, which lasers have only really been able to compete with in the last few years. What will we be printing on in another thirty years? That is, if there are any trees left to mulch into paper.