Xerox 9700

The machine descends from Gary Starkweather's work at Xerox PARC, where he aimed a laser at a copier drum instead of shining light through an original. The result was a printer that drew each page from data rather than from paper. IBM reached the market first with the 3800 the year before, but that one fed continuous forms for data centres; the 9700 took cut sheets and went after print-shop work.

The consequence was administrative more than technical. Since fonts, logos and form rules could be downloaded and printed along with the content, warehouses full of preprinted paper stopped being necessary. Its internal page description work became Interpress — and when two of the people behind it tired of Xerox's pace, they left, founded Adobe and wrote PostScript instead.