Charles Babbage designed a computer printer that waited until 2000 to be built
The first computer printer was designed in the 19th century by Charles Babbage, as a mechanical output for his difference engine. Nobody actually built it until 2000. He also sketched a curve plotter that would have been the first graphics printer, had it ever left the drawing board.
Real machines came much later. In 1962 C. R. Winston of Teletype Corporation patented a way of spraying ink electrostatically onto chosen areas of paper, a continuous inkjet method that used red stamp-pad ink and led to the Teletype Inktronic, delivered to customers in late 1966. Epson says its EP-101 of 1968 was the first compact, lightweight digital printer. Early commercial printers largely borrowed parts from electric typewriters and teleprinters.
By the 1980s buyers chose among daisy-wheel printers that typed like typewriters, fast line printers, and dot-matrix machines that mixed text and pictures at modest quality, while engineers used plotters for blueprints. Then HP's LaserJet of 1984 brought laser printing to a low price, and Apple's LaserWriter added the PostScript page language the following year. Suddenly an office could produce typeset-quality pages combining words and graphics, the revolution called desktop publishing. By 1990 most fliers and brochures were designed on personal computers, and costly offset presses were being scrapped. HP's DeskJet of 1988 delivered much of that flexibility more cheaply, and inkjets soon drove out dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers, falling below $100 by the 2000s.
Email and cheap reliable storage later reduced the need to print documents at all. Printers diversified instead. Personal models manage roughly 6 to 25 pages a minute, shared office machines 45 to about 100, and the Xerox 9700 reached 120. Others print ID cards with holographic overlays or barcode labels for shipping cartons, and virtual printers are just software that turns output into files such as PDFs.
Since about 2010, 3D printers have drawn intense interest, building objects layer by layer from plastic, metal, food, cement or wood under computer control. They take the name by analogy with inkjets laying down ink, and cheap kits using fused deposition modelling had made them a popular hobby by the 2020s.
Source: Printer (computing)
