History of the Printer

In 1953, the first high-speed printer was developed by Remington-Rand for use on the Univac computer.

In 1938, Chester Carlson invented a dry printing process called electrophotography commonly called a Xerox, the foundation technology for laser printers to come.

The original laser printer called EARS was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center beginning in 1969 and completed in November, 1971. Xerox Engineer, Gary Starkweather adapted Xerox copier technology adding a laser beam to it to come up with the laser printer. According to Xerox, "The Xerox 9700 Electronic Printing System, the first xerographic laser printer product, was released in 1977. The 9700, a direct descendent from the original PARC "EARS" printer which pioneered in laser scanning optics, character generation electronics, and page-formatting software, was the first product on the market to be enabled by PARC research." According to IBM, "the very first IBM 3800 was installed in the central accounting office at F. W. Woolworth’s North American data center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1976." The IBM 3800 Printing System was the industry’s first high-speed, laser printer. A laser printer that operated at speeds of more than 100 impressions-per-minute. It was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography according to IBM.

In 1992, Hewlett-Packard released the popular LaserJet 4, the first 600 by 600 dots per inch resolution laser printer.

In 1976, the inkjet printer was invented, but it took until 1988 for the inkjet to become a home consumer item with Hewlett-Parkard's release of the DeskJet inkjet printer, priced at a whopping $1000.

Service Contracts for a printer

Mainly customers have a choice of two agreements, Preventative Maintenance and Ad Hoc.

Preventative Maintenance, this agreement will cover the client if the fax breaks down or if it needs a service.
Ad Hoc, where a customer will phone a company asking for a service of there equipment, also did you know that “Ad Hoc” is a Latin phrase which means "for this purpose". It generally signifies a solution that has been tailored to a specific purpose. It can also refer to an improvised and often impromptu event or solution "on an ad-hoc basis".

How does a printer work?

There are two main different types of printer, Laser and Inkjet.

Inkjet

An inkjet printer is any printer that fires extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create an image. If you've ever looked at a piece of paper that has come out of an ink jet printer, you know that:

• The dots are extremely small (between 10 and 30 dots per millimeter).
• The dots are positioned very precisely.
• In color printers, the dots can have multiple colors.

Inkjet printers are fairly inexpensive -- less expensive than laser printers, and much less expensive than color laser printers. Different types of inkjet printers form their droplets of ink in different ways. There are several technologies used by printer manufacturers, but by far the most popular technique is the bubble jet. In a bubble jet printer, tiny resistors create heat, and this heat vaporizes ink to create a bubble. The expansion that creates the bubble causes a droplet to form and eject from the print head. A typical bubble jet print head has 64 or 128 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously.

Laser

The term inkjet printer is very descriptive of the process at work -- these printers put an image on paper using tiny jets of ink.

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