The LaserWriter was the key piece of a larger effort, “The Macintosh Office,” to make the nascent Mac more appealing to the business market. That effort can perhaps best be summarized by a poster Apple put out at the time:
The LaserWriter was literally at the center of the Macintosh Office, with the newly-announced “AppleTalk Personal Network” connecting various flavors of the Macintosh (including the Macintosh XL née Lisa) to each other, the LaserWriter and an IBM PC with an under-development AppleTalk Card (“available later this year”; it wasn’t).
The Macintosh Office announcement (January 1985) also included a number of other “under development” products which didn’t even make the poster, in particular an AppleTalk-based file server. Originally intended as a screen-less box based on Mac hardware and software, the file server would ship two years later as the “AppleShare” application running on a Mac with a hard disk.
For a while it looked like most of the Macintosh Office was too little too late. It didn’t help that it was introduced by a very negative TV ad (see next post). But the key components of Mac+LaserWriter+AppleTalk became the de facto standards in the Desktop Publishing revolution, as well as the basis for a number of Future-distributing innovations to come.