The Xerox 9700 was a high-end
laser printer
Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively-charged cylinder called a "drum" to ...
manufactured by
Xerox
Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...
Corporation beginning in 1977.
Based on the Xerox 9200 copier, the 9700 printed at 300 dots-per-inch on cut-sheet paper at up to two pages per second (pps), one- or two-sided, that is simplex or
duplex, landscape or portrait.
Description
The 9700 was intended for high-volume applications. It included a disk drive and a modified
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...
(DEC)
PDP-11/34
as a print controller and
rasterizer. It could connect to an IBM mainframe via a
parallel channel. It offered an input tray that could hold up to 2500 sheets of paper (20lb bond/75gsm) and an auxiliary input tray for an additional 400 sheets. It had two output stackers, each capable of holding 1500 sheets. An operator control console consisted of a CRT display terminal and keyboard. It optionally included a
9 track tape
9 (nine) is the natural number following and preceding .
Evolution of the Arabic digit
In the beginning, various Indians wrote a digit 9 similar in shape to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and ...
drive which could be used to load documents for printing, to supply software and
bitmapped font
upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...
s, or run
backups.
Historic importance
In 1980,
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
and some other hackers at the
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of a newly installed Xerox 9700. Stallman had modified the software for the Lab's previous laser printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users waiting for print jobs if the printer was jammed. Not being able to add these features to the new printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be able to freely modify the software they use, thus the launch of the
Free Software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
movement.
[ Chapter 1. Available under the ]GFDL
The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the ...
in both the initia
O'Reilly edition
(accessed on October 27, 2006) and the update
. Retrieved October 27, 2006.
See also
*
DocuTech
DocuTech is the name given to a line of electronic production-publishing systems produced by Xerox Corporation. It allowed paper documents to be scanned, electronically edited, and then printed on demand. DocuTech systems were the last known to us ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Xerox 9700 brochure
Xerox
Computer printers
Non-impact printing
Products introduced in 1977