Business Management Blog

Launched in 1977, the Xerox 9700 was the first commercial laser printer. The man who personally came up with the idea of laser printing was Gary Starkweather. He joined Xerox in July 1964 as an optical engineer on advanced copier technology.

His idea came while working with lasers as an alternative light source for high-speed facsimile systems. It dawned on him that, rather than scan and transmit someone else’s document, you could generate one using a computer and send the electrical signals direct to the printer portion of the fax machine.

The idea was born, but Starkweather’s management was less than impressed. The high cost of lasers at the time made them believe such a device could never be affordable. Starkweather was told to stop working on his laser printer concept, but he battled on, convinced falling prices would make it a viable option.

As this conflict came to a head in mid-1970, Xerox announced it was to build a new California-based lab to research digital technology. The Palo Alto Research Center (Parc) proved to be a dream come true for Starkweather. He approached them and discovered the department researching personal computing technologies was wondering what they’d use for a printer.

In January 1971, Starkweather and his family relocated to California. Parc’s management fully supported the idea for a laser printer. After Starkweather had equipped his lab, he was instructed to create a working laser printer for the Alto personal computer that was being developed in parallel.

Laser printing with tiny spots of light proved to be an ideal match for the Alto’s bitmapped display. Printing with pixels was a natural way to convert such screen images to paper and lasers were the only light source capable of positioning the millions of points required to create a high-quality page in a second.

Starkweather was soon joined by Bob Kowalski, who helped turn his ideas into real working circuitry. Tibor Fisli later provided mechanical design and fabrication skills, while lab manager Bill Gunning was a source of encouragement.

One challenge was to find a way to deflect thousands of points of laser light hundreds of times a second with inexpensive optics. The solution was to employ a rotating mirror with around 30 faces. As the mirror spun, each face deflected the laser across the photoconductor, while a special light modulator turned the beam on and off millions of times per second.

Starkweather’s team adapted an existing Xerox 7000 reduction duplicator into the first working laser printer in just nine months. Designed for the Alto computer, it used low-cost Helium-Neon lasers, ran at 60 pages per minute and was called Slot –- Scanning Laser Output Terminal. Once completed, Starkweather’s team began researching a smaller, more personal laser printer and a colour model based on the Xerox 6500 copier.

In the meantime, a team lead by Jack Lewis with Tom Robinson and Ronald Rider developed Starkweather’s prototype into a commercial laser printer. Eventually announced on 1 June 1977, the Xerox 9700 printer was based on the 9200 copier, ran at two pages per second, delivered a resolution of 300 dots per inch and was compatible with large IBM 360 systems. The standard model cost $325,000 (£182,000 approx), increasing to $500,000 for one with all the bells and whistles.

Xerox calculated each 9700 needed to generate about 300,000 pages per month in order for servicing and toner refills to be profitable. In reality, the average page count was over a million per month. Some businesses, such as Bank of America in Los Angeles, had 14 9700s running 24 hours a day with Xerox staff attending to their needs around the clock.

The 9700 and departmental laser printing made a fortune for Xerox, but it failed to see any profit in personal models. Despite Xerox scientists working on the idea, it was left to Canon to develop a cartridge toner system. This may have cost the owner more, but was easy to replace and generated a lot more profit.

Canon’s laser engine was subsequently employed by a new breed of personal laser printers, making companies like HP very rich. In the two decades following Starkweather’s idea, personal laser printers spearheaded the DTP revolution and became standard equipment in almost every office -– and the spinning mirror deflection system is still used to this day.

Source: PC Today