Qume was a manufacturer of

daisy-wheel Daisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to p ...

printers originally located in

Hayward, California Hayward () is a city located in Alameda County, California 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 Alameda Coun ...

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

Puerto Rico Puerto Rico (; abbreviated PR; tnq, Boriken, ''Borinquen''), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico ( es, link=yes, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, lit=Free Associated State of Puerto Rico), is a Caribbean island and Unincorporated ...

. 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. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...

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 WYSE (970 AM) is a radio station located in Canton, North Carolina, that simulcasts WISE's sports format from Asheville, North Carolina. Owned by the Asheville Radio Group subsidiary of Saga Communications, the station is licensed by the Fede ...

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 ...

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 as a brand name identifies the line of laser printers marketed by the American computer company Hewlett-Packard (HP). The HP LaserJet was the first popular desktop laser printer. Canon supplies both mechanisms and cartridges for most HP ...

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 in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

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 chip-design company that originally focused on floating-point units for a number of commercial CPU designs. During the early to mid-1980s, Weitek designs could be found powering a number of high-end designs a ...

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

Acorn Archimedes Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. The systems are based on Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and the proprietary operating systems Arthur and RISC OS. The fi ...

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 a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was designed to run on the ARM chipset, which Acorn had designed concurrently for use in its new line of Archim ...

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