[3] During the mid-1970s, Canon started working on similar machines, and partnered with Hewlett-Packard to produce 1980's HP 2680, which filled only part of a room.

Meanwhile, John Warnock had left Xerox to found Adobe Systems to commercialize PostScript and AppleTalk in a laser printer they intended to market.

Negotiations between Apple and Adobe over the use of PostScript began in 1983 and an agreement was reached in December 1983, one month before Macintosh was announced.

Arranging his own funding through a venture capital firm, Brainerd formed Aldus and began development of what would become PageMaker.

However, the LaserWriter featured AppleTalk support that allowed the printer to be shared among as many as sixteen Macs, meaning that its per-user price could fall to under $450, far less expensive than HP's less-advanced model.

The combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript, PageMaker and the Mac's GUI and built-in AppleTalk networking would ultimately transform the landscape of computer desktop publishing.

[7] At the time, Apple planned to release a suite of AppleTalk products as part of the Macintosh Office, with the LaserWriter being only the first component.

[12] While competing printers and their associated control languages offered some of the capabilities of PostScript, they were limited in their ability to reproduce free-form layouts (as a desktop publishing application might produce), use outline fonts, or offer the level of detail and control over the page layout.

To support this, the LaserWriter featured a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, 512 KB of workspace RAM, and a 1 MB frame buffer.

At 230.4 kbit/s LocalTalk was slower than the Centronics PC parallel interface, but allowed several computers to share a single LaserWriter.

PostScript enabled the LaserWriter to print complex pages containing high-resolution bitmap graphics, outline fonts, and vector illustrations.

Paired with the program Aldus PageMaker, the LaserWriter gave the layout editor an exact replica of the printed page.

Apple's competitors (i.e., QMS, NEC, and others) generally used a variation of one of Adobe's RIPs with their large quantity of small-scale-integration (i.e., Texas Instruments' 7400 series) ICs.

and even Linotype's first image setter which featured PostScript employed such a "reference model" (but with customization for the Linotronic's different video interface, plus the necessary implementation of "banding" and a hard drive frame buffer and font storage mechanism).