HP LaserJet - History - 1980s

1980s

HP introduced the first laser printer for IBM compatible personal computers in May 1984 at the National Computer Conference (COMDEX). It was a 300-dpi, 8 ppm printer that sold for $3,495 with the price reduced to $2,995 in September 1985, and featured an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and could print in a variety of character fonts. It was controlled using PCL3. Due to the high cost of memory, the first LaserJet only had 128 kilobytes of memory, and a portion of that was reserved for use by the controller.

The HP LaserJet printer had high print quality, could print horizontally or vertically, and produce graphics. It was ideal for printing memos, letters, and spreadsheets. It was quiet compared to other contemporary printers, so people could talk on the phone while sitting next to the HP LaserJet printer as it was printing.

The first LaserJet was a high-speed replacement for text-only daisy wheel impact printers and dot matrix printers. By using control codes it was possible to change the printed text style using font patterns stored in permanent ROM in the printer. Although unsupported by HP, because the Laserjet used the same basic PCL language (PCL Level III) spoken by HP's other printers it was possible to use the Laserjet on HP 3000 multiuser systems.

The LaserJet Plus followed in September 1985, priced at US$3,995. It introduced "soft fonts", treatments like bold and italic and other features including a parallel (Centronics) interface. It also included 512 kilobytes of memory, which was just enough to print graphics at 300 dpi that covered about 70% of the letter-size page area.

In March 1986 HP introduced the LaserJet D+, which included the LaserJet print engine and formatter but with 2 paper trays. The original MSRP was $4,495. In 1986, desktop publishing came to the world of IBM PCs and compatibles, after its origin on the Apple Macintosh and Apple LaserWriter. The HP LaserJet family, along with Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Windows, was central to the PC-based solution and while the design was more plebeian than Apple's product, this multi-vendor solution was available to a mass audience for the first time.

HP introduced the mass-market laser printer, the LaserJet series II, in March 1987. The HP LaserJet II was designed from the ground up as a laser printer with correct order page output as opposed to being leveraged from the Canon PC-20 personal copier. The HP LaserJet II used PCL4, improved features, more memory and fonts for a market price of $2,695.

Also in March 1987, the LaserJet 2000 was launched. A high-end, networkable printer, the LaserJet 2000 offered a duty cycle of 70,000 pages per month and the standard 300-dpi output, initially priced at $19,995.

The HP LaserJet IID was released in the fall of 1988, It was the first desktop laser printer capable of duplexing. It was also the first HP LaserJet with an HP designed and manufactured formatter.

In September 1989, HP introduced the first "personal" version of the HP LaserJet printer series, the LaserJet IIP. Priced at US$1,495 by HP, and half the size and price of its predecessor, the LaserJet II, it offered 300-dpi output and 4 ppm printing with PCL 4 enhancements such as support for compressed bitmapped fonts and raster images. It was also the first no ozone print engine. Retailers predicted a street price of $1000 or less, making it the world’s first sub-$1,000 laser printer. The LaserJet IIP (and its very similar successor, the IIIP) were extremely reliable except for scanner failures, diagnosable by the lack of the familiar "dentist drill" whine and a "52" error displayed on the control panel; aftermarket replacement scanner assemblies remain readily available to this day.