Qume was a manufacturer of daisy-wheel printers originally located in

Hayward, California Hayward is a city located in Alameda County, California, United States, in the East Bay subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area. With a population of 162,954 as of 2020, Hayward is the sixth largest city in the Bay Area, and the third largest in ...

, later moving to San Jose. Around 1980, it also opened a manufacturing facility in

Puerto Rico ; abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, is a Government of Puerto Rico, self-governing Caribbean Geography of Puerto Rico, archipelago and island organized as an Territories of the United States, unincorporated territo ...

. It once dominated the daisy-wheel market. As the market for its printers declined in the 1980s, the company developed a line of

computer terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...

s. It was founded by David S. Lee and Robert E. SchroederThe Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs, William H. Draper III, St. Martin's Press, 1/4/2011, ASIN B004CYERLI, page 168 in 1973, grew to become the largest printer company in the world, and was acquired by

ITT Corporation ITT Inc., formerly ITT Corporation, is an American worldwide manufacturing company based in Stamford, Connecticut. The company produces specialty components for the aerospace, transportation, energy and industrial markets. ITT's three businesses ...

for an unprecedented $164M in 1978. It remained a division of ITT until its acquisition by Wyse Technology sometime before 1995. Qume also manufactured floppy diskette drives, particularly 5.25" ones, but it also manufactured 8" diskette drives as well. Qume's diskette drives were included in some IBM PC models, such as the Portable Personal Computer and PCjr. Qume was originally named Ancilex, but, because that name was not unique, changed its name to something that seemed like no one else would have ever used it, Qume. Amusingly, when the manufacturing plant was opened in Puerto Rico, one of the employees hired there was named Qume.

Qume CrystalPrint

Towards the end of the 1980s, Qume introduced a range of printers competing with

laser printers 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 d ...

, but instead of directing a laser beam at the photosensitive drum, it employed "liquid crystal shutters" made by

Casio is a Japanese multinational electronics manufacturing corporation headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Its products include calculators, mobile phones, digital cameras, electronic musical instruments, and analogue and digital watches. It ...

to control the illumination of the drum by a tungsten halide lamp. Around 2,500 independent segments or shutters were used to "expose" a line across the drum, equivalent to a pass of the laser beam in a conventional laser printer. In early 1989, two models were available. The Qume CrystalPrint WP cost around £900, featured 128 KB of RAM and only one built-in typeface, emulating only a

Diablo 630 The Diablo 630 is a discontinued daisy wheel style computer printer sold by the Diablo Data Systems division of the Xerox Corporation beginning in 1980. The printer is capable of letter-quality printing; that is, its print quality is equivalent t ...

daisywheel printer. The Qume CrystalPrint Series II cost around £1400, featured 512 KB of RAM and was capable of graphical output, emulating the

HP LaserJet LaserJet is a line of laser printers sold by HP Inc. (originally Hewlett-Packard) since 1984. The LaserJet was the world's first commercially successful laser printer. Canon supplies both mechanisms and cartridges for most HP laser printers; so ...

II with an Epson emulation card available for an additional £125. The Qume CrystalPrint Publisher, when introduced to the UK in 1989, cost £3449 and was the first model in the range to offer

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

compatibility. The reduced price relative to most PostScript printers was attributed to the use of a "PostScript interpreter clone" together with fonts from

Bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...

. The printer contained a Qume-commissioned controller board employing a

Weitek Weitek Corporation was an American Microprocessor, chip-design company that originally focused on floating-point units for a number of commercial Central processing unit, CPU designs. During the early to mid-1980s, Weitek designs could be found ...

chipset that was reported as interpreting "the bulk of PostScript in hardware". Performance and compatibility was well regarded, although limitations were noted around paper handling and emulations of other kinds of printers. An upgrade board was also available to give Qume CrystalPrint Series II printers PostScript compatibility. Subsequent models in the range included the CrystalPrint Publisher II, featuring improved paper handling over its predecessor, and CrystalPrint Express, a network printer with 3 MB of RAM supplied and a resolution. The CrystalPrint engine was itself used in the

Computer Concepts Xara is an international software company founded in 1981, with an HQ in Berlin and development office in Hemel Hempstead, UK. It has developed software for a variety of computer platforms, in chronological order: the Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Z ...

LaserDirect printer, announced in 1990 at a price of £1148, aimed at the

Acorn Archimedes The Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems in this family use Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and initially ran the Arthur operating system, with later models ...

range of computers. This printer was driven directly by the host computer in conjunction with an expansion card, eliminating various costs associated with conventional laser printers, specifically the hardware and software responsible for page rendering (leaving "the bare minimum of circuitry in the printer"), and took advantage of the Archimedes' ARM processor to deliver competitive printing performance, albeit requiring the host computer to hold the image of each page in its own memory. A

RISC OS RISC OS () is an operating system designed to run on ARM architecture, ARM computers. Originally designed in 1987 by Acorn Computers of England, it was made for use in its new line of ARM-based Acorn Archimedes, Archimedes personal computers an ...

compatible printer driver combined with Acorn's outline font format permitted a single set of scalable fonts to be used for both screen and printer use. Calligraph's ArcLaser product, launched at around the same time, was broadly similar, and both products were regarded as "offering faster-than-Postscript speed for less-than-laserjet price".

References

External links

{{Commons category
Qume product manuals, 1979-1983

Qume Division
- German division of Wyse selling monitors under the Qume brand name 1995 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1973 American companies disestablished in 1995 Companies based in Hayward, California Computer companies established in 1973 Computer companies disestablished in 1995 Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area