3 ms·

I thought a "Laserwriter Printer" was going to be some gigantic CDRW burner from the 80s and wasn't too surprised about the cost for a dev to mass make CDs that

by swozey 3y ago

I thought a "Laserwriter Printer" was going to be some gigantic CDRW burner from the 80s and wasn't too surprised about the cost for a dev to mass make CDs that they can send to customers vs 3rd partying it. But thats a (paper) laser printer.. oof. I do remember my parents spending $300-500 on a laser printer in the 90s. I guess dot matrix was that bad.

aidenn0 3y ago
If I finished writing a school paper too late into the night, I had to wait until morning to print it on my dot-matrix because it would wake the entire house up.
- emeril 3y ago
  I think they made special boxes you could put the printer in to attenuate the noise it made though generally closing the door of the room it was in was sufficient (this was whatever printer we had with an apple 2gs... probably some sort of imagewriter) and the print quality was relatively poor especially compared to laser mostly my siblings used it as they are older than me - I was able to use an inkjet (!) in future years and now rarely print anything other than return labels...
duskwuff 3y ago
The LaserWriter was released in 1985, and was one of the first laser printers on the market (after the HP LaserJet a year earlier). It was a pretty big deal at the time.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  And the cost was easily justified at the time for a small business making customer-facing documents in-house.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    Especially because it was also the first network laser printer. The LaserJet series didn't get networking until 1987, and that model cost $20k.
  - eschneider 3y ago
    If you owned one and could do design, you could basically print money with it. The legal way.
eschneider 3y ago
I worked on a Adobe Acrobat-like document system (way before Acrobat :) that mastered CDRs back in the late 80s/very early 90s. The blank disks were $50 a pop and if you blinked and the data transmission hiccuped, it was a coaster. :0

by swozey 3y ago

aidenn0 3y ago

If I finished writing a school paper too late into the night, I had to wait until morning to print it on my dot-matrix because it would wake the entire house up.

emeril 3y ago
I think they made special boxes you could put the printer in to attenuate the noise it made though generally closing the door of the room it was in was sufficient (this was whatever printer we had with an apple 2gs... probably some sort of imagewriter) and the print quality was relatively poor especially compared to laser mostly my siblings used it as they are older than me - I was able to use an inkjet (!) in future years and now rarely print anything other than return labels...

duskwuff 3y ago

The LaserWriter was released in 1985, and was one of the first laser printers on the market (after the HP LaserJet a year earlier). It was a pretty big deal at the time.

johnwalkr 3y ago
And the cost was easily justified at the time for a small business making customer-facing documents in-house.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  Especially because it was also the first network laser printer. The LaserJet series didn't get networking until 1987, and that model cost $20k.
- eschneider 3y ago
  If you owned one and could do design, you could basically print money with it. The legal way.

eschneider 3y ago

I worked on a Adobe Acrobat-like document system (way before Acrobat :) that mastered CDRs back in the late 80s/very early 90s. The blank disks were $50 a pop and if you blinked and the data transmission hiccuped, it was a coaster. :0