Month: June 2025

There was one additional important piece to the upcoming desktop publishing revolution. The combination of the Mac, LaserWriter, Postscript and AppleTalk let Mac users easily print, in very high quality, anything they could create and view on the Macintosh screen. But, as revolutionary as the Macintosh was, its 9-inch screen was black-and-white with a resolution…

The Macintosh was introduced in early 1984 with an epic Super Bowl ad, “1984.” The Macintosh Office was introduced in early 1985 with a not-so-epic Super Bowl ad, “Lemmings.” Like much of the Mac’s introduction, “1984” was a rousing success. Like much of the Macintosh Office’s introduction, “Lemmings” wasn’t. “1984” opens with Big Brother (of…

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…

One reason that it was practical to implement AppleTalk in both the Mac and LaserWriter at the same time was that the LaserWriter, by design, looked like a Mac to much of the software. It used the same 68000 CPU (processor) as the Mac, and the same SCC (serial communications) chip. The LaserWriter was actually…

With manufacturing well underway, the LaserWriter was crashing. After a brief interlude at the Hawaii sales conference, the team was back at work finishing the software that would let the LaserWriter print from Macs connected to it through an AppleTalk network. There were a number of pieces: The Mac systems team was hard at work…