NW-Bound
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2008
- Messages
- 35,712
The time frame I had in mind was perhaps later, but I remember at one point many Postscript printers used the Intel i960, which was also a defacto standard RISC chip for use in embedded aerospace applications.The first PostScript printer, the original LaserWriter, cost $6,995 and used a Motorola 68000 processor (definitely not a RISC chip) and had 1.5 MB of RAM. And only weighted 77 pounds!
Today's printers generally use "systems on a chip" (SoC) that have way more power than the old printers did.
I still have a LaserWriter down in my "boneyard", though it's not one of the original models.
My 1st Postscript printer was made by a defunct company called LaserMaster. It cost me $1400 in 1991, and was basically a reworked HP engine that accepted bit-mapped images transferred from the PC. It was the software driver in the PC that did all the work of translating PS to bit maps. It printed nice pages in 1200dpi, and was the only one that could do that in that price range back then. The company went defunct, and I "lost" this printer when I upgraded from Windows 95.
More recently, I had an HP laser printer that HP only supported up to Windows XP. There's no driver for it with Windows Vista or 7. It is one of those "dumbed down" printers. On the other hand, I also have a couple of HP laser printers that were bought back in the Windows NT days, and they still work with Windows 7. They are "self-contained" printers.