[1] 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.

It included a disk drive and a modified Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11/34[2] as a print controller and rasterizer.

It optionally included a 9-track tape drive which could be used to load documents for printing, to supply software and bitmapped fonts, or run backups.

[3] The 9700 had separate imaging units for each side of the paper, which allowed it to print simplex or duplex with no decrease in speed.

The Xerox 9700 played a part in the beginning of the Free Software movement: In 1980, Richard Stallman and some other hackers at the MIT AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of a newly installed Xerox 9700.