The Xerox 2700 is a discontinued
monochrome
A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochr ...
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 ...
from
Xerox Corporation
Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from St ...
. The 2700 was announced in March, 1982, and can print up to 12 pages per minute (PPM), one-sided, on standard A4 or Letter cut-sheet paper. It occupies of floor space, and cost $18,995 (). The 2700 is rated for a print volume of 15,000 pages per month, although some users got up to 100,000 pages.
History
The first successful products based on the
xerographic process were for office copying applications with direct optical imaging, but by about 1961 there were experiments under way at Xerox to explore other applications and imaging methods. In 1964, Xerox introduced LDX (
Long Distance Xerography) a facsimile system which used a
CRT (cathode ray tube) as an imaging source. A version for computer printing was offered as the XGP (Xerox Graphics Printer).
In 1973, The
Xerox 1200
The Xerox 1200 Computer Printing System is significant as being the first commercial non-impact Xerographic printer used to create computer output. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a laser printer, but it did not in fact have a laser.
...
, used an optical analogue of the drum
line printer
A line printer prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early line printers were
impact printers.
Line printers are mostly associated with unit record equipment and the early days of digital computing, but the ...
—a spinning optical character drum and a row of
xenon
Xenon is a chemical element with the symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the ...
tubes whose flashing was timed to project the required characters onto the xerographic photosensor. It was ingenious and unique. In 1977, Xerox introduced laser imaging for computer printing with the
9700 which was based on the 9200
copier and digital imaging technology from
PARC.
Although the Xerox 8010 ''
Star
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...
'', introduced in 1981, was not a commercial success, one of the technologies it developed was the ''XP-12'' ''marking engine'' for the Xerox 8044 printer, which became the basis for the 2700.
The 2700 was rebadged by
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 ...
, who marketed it as the ''LN01''.
Data stream
Conventional character printer protocols of the time used control characters and ''escape codes'' (the ESC character followed by another character) for formatting. Laser printing extensions required additional escape codes for functions like font changes and imbedded images. Xerox developed a
page description language
In digital printing, a page description language (PDL) is a computer language that describes the appearance of a printed page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap (or generally raster graphics). An overlapping term is printer control la ...
known as
Xerox Escape Sequence (XES).
Specifications
The 2700 prints 12 pages per minute minute at 300x300 dots per inch(DPI). It has two 250-sheet
input paper cassettes, and a 500 sheet offsetting stacker to offset sections of output between print jobs or copy groups.
It uses an
Intel 8086
The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allo ...
CPU and an
Intel 8089 coprocessor
A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography or I ...
for input/output. It comes with 64 KB or 256 KB of
RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
* ...
and 32 KB of
ROM, with up to 4 32 KB in plug-in cartridges. The on-board ROM holds two font sets, portrait and landscape. The optional plug-in cartridges hold fonts and logos, and additional bitmaps can be downloaded.
The 2700 offers a variety of
interface
Interface or interfacing may refer to:
Academic journals
* ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society
* '' Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics''
* '' Int ...
options. it provides
serial ''Binary Synchronous'' (Bisync)—
IBM 2770/2780/3780 emulation or
asynchronous
Asynchrony is the state of not being in synchronization.
Asynchrony or asynchronous may refer to:
Electronics and computing
* Asynchrony (computer programming), the occurrence of events independent of the main program flow, and ways to deal wit ...
communications. It also supports
parallel
Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to:
Computing
* Parallel algorithm
* Parallel computing
* Parallel metaheuristic
* Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel
* Parallel Sysplex, a cluster o ...
Centronics
Centronics Data Computer Corporation was an American manufacturer of computer printers, now remembered primarily for the parallel interface that bears its name, the Centronics connector.
History
Foundations
Centronics began as a division ...
or
Dataproducts
Dataproducts Corporation was an early manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment.
Overview
Initially known as Data Products, the company was founded by Erwin Tomash in 1962 in order to take controlling interest of Telex's Data Systems Divis ...
emulation.
See also
*
Laser printing
References
Xerox
Laser printers
Office equipment
Computer-related introductions in 1982
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