[inforoots] Laser Printers

[Les Earnest]

Postings on the Itek color laser printer remind me that a decade 
earlier a xerographic computer printer was developed nearby at MIT 
Lincoln Lab and could have revolutionized the printer field if Xerox 
executives had been on their toes. Around 1961 engineers working for 
Wes Clark there took a Xerox office copier, replaced the sheet feed 
with paper roll feed and replaced the paper imaging optics with a 
high intensity CRT, specifically a Charactron tube, which included a 
shaped beam character generator -- see 
http://www.wps.com/projects/Charactron/index.html. It was connected 
to the TX-2 computer there and was used for many years to print both 
text and line drawings. I still have a lot of its output.

Shortly after it was built, the Lincoln Lab people invited Xerox 
executives to see it and consider turning it into a product. They 
said "Very interesting!" and went away, never to be seen or heard 
from again. I believe that if Xerox had pursued that development they 
would have dominated the computer printer market and whole 
generations of inferior printers based on electrographic paper or 
hammers with print drums or chains would not have happened. During 
that same era, Xerox was being praised to the heavens by Wall Street 
for maintaining corporate focus on office copiers.

Around 1970, Xerox did build a CRT-based xerographic printer as part 
of their high speed facsimile system, called LDX (Long Distance 
Xerography). However it was a commercial failure and they ended up 
with a warehouse full of unsold systems. Fortunately, with a bit of 
prodding from folks at Xerox PARC, they were kind enough to donate 
these printers to various university groups, including the Stanford 
Artificial Intelligence Lab where I was executive officer, and we all 
developed mult-font and graphical printing capabilities around them.

In 1980, based partly on my experience with the XGP, I co-founded 
IMAGEN Corporation, which made the earliest desktop publishing 
systems using laser printers, based on Sun microcomputers and Canon 
marking engines. However we were unable to get venture capital 
funding because they had never heard of laser printers. Nevertheless 
in three years we managed to bootstrap to success ($12 million in 
annual sales with almost no advertising), which finally induced some 
venture capitalists to invest.They then thoroughly screwed up the 
company, which eventually got gobbled up by a competitor, which in 
turn was eaten by Minolta. It was an interesting educational 
experience and I made a bundle, but it could have turned out much 
better if we had received early funding with much less advice from the VCs.

	-Les Earnest