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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

I like the story about how Andy Hertzfeld 'sold' RMaker to Apple for one of the first LaserWriter printers ($7,000 USD in the early 80's)

https://folklore.org/RMaker.html

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Mercifully, Apple gave certified developers half off for those printers. I remember getting a bank loan for the $3500 printer. It cost more than my car. :0

I thought a "Laserwriter Printer" was going to be some gigantic CDRW burner from the 80s and wasn't too surprised about the cost for a dev to mass make CDs that they can send to customers vs 3rd partying it.

But thats a (paper) laser printer.. oof. I do remember my parents spending $300-500 on a laser printer in the 90s. I guess dot matrix was that bad.

If I finished writing a school paper too late into the night, I had to wait until morning to print it on my dot-matrix because it would wake the entire house up.

I think they made special boxes you could put the printer in to attenuate the noise it made though generally closing the door of the room it was in was sufficient (this was whatever printer we had with an apple 2gs... probably some sort of imagewriter)

and the print quality was relatively poor especially compared to laser

mostly my siblings used it as they are older than me - I was able to use an inkjet (!) in future years and now rarely print anything other than return labels...

The LaserWriter was released in 1985, and was one of the first laser printers on the market (after the HP LaserJet a year earlier). It was a pretty big deal at the time.

And the cost was easily justified at the time for a small business making customer-facing documents in-house.

Especially because it was also the first network laser printer. The LaserJet series didn't get networking until 1987, and that model cost $20k.

If you owned one and could do design, you could basically print money with it. The legal way.

I worked on a Adobe Acrobat-like document system (way before Acrobat :) that mastered CDRs back in the late 80s/very early 90s. The blank disks were $50 a pop and if you blinked and the data transmission hiccuped, it was a coaster. :0

Interesting to figure out where its cost comes from – the LaserWriter had a 68000 (no FPU) and 1.5MB of RAM – the Macintosh 512k released late '84 cost $2795, and it's surprisingly hard to find a workstation with increased memory but without secret sauce chips (e.g. the SUN bespoke MMU, whatever SGI had going on.)

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