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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Yes, laser printers were one of the big markets for the i960. The Am29000 was their main competitor. (People nowadays probably don't realize how computationally intensive laser printers were.)

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There is an apocryphal story* where the fancy new laser printer was having strange issues and would become unresponsive for long periods of time. The sysadmin tasked with figuring it out managed to trace it down to one user who kept sending strange print jobs that took forever and never printed anything. When asked about the jobs the programmer said that the processor in the printer was much more powerful than anything else in the company so he added a postscript target to his engineering programs so they ran simulations on the printer.

* That is, I don't remember where where I first heard it, probably a usenet post somewhere

I heard it about Berthold K P Horn https://www.eecs.mit.edu/people/berthold-horn/, professor of machine vision. And it was extra convenient because he wanted to output the result of the computation as an image anyway, and what better way than with a high-quality printer?

Hmm, that almost seems like fair-game.

My officemate Paul Heckbert wrote a ray tracer in PostScript after we realized that the laser printer's processor was much more powerful than our "real" computer. As you might expect, the interpreted PostScript ray tracer was extremely slow but it did eventually generate an image, I think at 32x32 resolution.

SPARCprinters were like WinModems of their time: they offloaded all the Display PostScript processing to the host. The printer was essentially interfaced like an external monitor; the host would do all the rendering and then read out a finished image for the printer to immediately lay down on paper.

The NeXT laser did the same.

I remember hearing that for a few years, the LaserWriter (or was it the LaserWriter II?) was the most powerful computer you could buy from Apple.

The original LaserWriter came out in 1985 with a M68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, with 512 KB working RAM and a 1 MB framebuffer.

The Macintosh at the time had the same M68000 CPU, only running at only 8 MHz and with 128 KB of RAM (or 512 KB for the Fat Mac) which was shared with screen RAM.

That's misleading. The reason was not because it's a "laser printer" but because it was running PostScript (which is a full fledge programming language). Had the "API" been a trivial image printer (like the NeXT laser printer), then the compute requirements would have been far less intense.

Compared with dot matrix printers, sure. But more so than inkjets?

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