Steve Jobs never wanted to be in the printer business at all. It was, and still is, is a very low profit margin business. Printer manufacturers at the time, no matter how much and how often he pitched, and Steve, who was a very exceptionally talented sales person, couldn’t convince a single printer manufacturer to develop a desktop printer for for Macs. He was forced to develop a printer. And Steve also had to twist arms, legs and kick derrières to develop toners and toner cartridges for printers. But once printer companies realized Apple’s market share was growing wildly, they jumped on the Mac marketplace asap. And Apple happily walked away.
Typography and graphics were one of the, if not the very, very, very best, selling points for the original Macs. Steve worked very, very closely with Adobe at the time to develop PDF, as well as for type and graphics management, and added color management a few years down the line.
PS: My husband and I bought our Laser Writer in 1989. It lived happily and preformed beautifully until late 2010. We bought an HP printer then because HP was the original printer manufacturer of the Laser Writers.
The first laser printers were very expensive high-speed non-impact printers invented by Xerox and IBM that came out in the 1970s, which used lasers to write on xerographic drums. They were expensive, but they could churn out a million individualized form letters (bank statements, utility bills and junk mail) per month (more than one per second). They were hugely expensive, but hugely profitable for Xerox and IBM.
The breakthrough that made the Apple LaserWriter possible was when Canon developing an inexpensive drum that could be written on with an inexpensive semiconductor diode laser (the same laser that made Compact Disc audio in the 1980s). Apple started using the Canon engine in its first laser printer in 1985. List of Apple printers - Wikipedia. That gave a big boost to Apple in graphics.
There may be some confusion since the HP LaserJet came out in 1984 before Apple’s version and both used the same Canon engine/parts. From the Wiki:
“The LaserWriter used the same Canon CX printing engine as the HP LaserJet, and as a consequence early LaserWriters and LaserJets shared the same toner cartridges and paper trays.”
When the StyleWriter was released later, that used a Canon engine as well as later Stylewriters until the last ones like the 6500 or the 4100 which were rebadged HP’s.
I question this timeline. PDF was developed in 1991 and was released in 1993, during the time when Steve was at NeXT, not Apple.
PostScript (on which PDF is based) was first released in 1982 - before the Mac was released.
Where Jobs was involved was in the design and implementation of Display PostScript, a variation of PostScript designed for use as an interactive graphic API that was primarily used by NeXT Step.
Of course, when Jobs returned to Apple, he was key to ensuring that Mac OS X included native PDF support. But PDF was already an established standard by that point in time.
When both were shipping, it was very obvious that both the HP LaserJet and the Apple LaserWriter were pretty much the same hardware. This remained the case through many many generations of HP’s and Apple’s printers. The big differences between the Apple and HP products were:
The data interface
HP’s had parallel port interfaces, with other interfaces made available via add-on interface cards.
Apple’s had 8-pin DIN connectors supporting serial and AppleTalk interfaces.
Later on, both offered Ethernet interfaces as standard equipment.
Some of the Apple printers included a SCSI interface where you could connect a hard drive containing PostScript fonts.
The API
HP’s printers had an API featuring fixed-size fonts and bitmaps (later on, various versions of PCL), with PostScript and additional fonts available via add-on hardware.
Apple’s printers always had PostScript built-in.
One amusing thing is that the first versions of Mac OS didn’t have the ability to generate PostScript output natively. Instead, the computer would send QuickDraw commands to the printer, uploading a QuickDraw interpreter (as a PostScript application) to the printer before the first print job. (I seem to remember reading that this was a stopgap because Apple didn’t want to delay the release of the LaserWriter while waiting for native PostScript support to be completed.)
Of course, later versions of Mac OS would generate PostScript output natively and many later printers (e.g. the StyleWriter series) would use a variation on QuickDraw as their native print APIs.
I remember wanting to get a laser printer for my Apple IIGS but the Apple’s were a bit expensive. So I got an Epson and put a parallel printer card in an open slot and went that route and it worked well for many years until something gave out on the printer. You did have to install a certain printer driver for it to work (possibly Harmonie) but the results were great.
I had forgotten about HP’s first laser printers. Apple’s Laserwriter and MacDraw were godsends in the 1986-1987 period. I wrote three books on optics during the time and used MacDraw to draw simple line drawings that showed fundamental concepts of optics. I didn’t have a LaserWriter of my own, but managed to get someone – I think at the publishers – to print them. MacDraw and the LaserWriter did everything I needed quite easily and at a fraction of the cost of hiring a draftsman. If anybody is interested, you can get a PDF copy of the book for middle-school readers, Optics:Light for a New Age, at https://payhip.com/b/gFIr (The book is a scan of the original). You can tell I’m no artist, but MacDraw made me an adequate draftsman for such a simple job.
PDF was a standard, but until 1984, it was a standard that could not run on a desktop computer. I’m coming from a print magazine and advertising background, and in the pre Mac/PDF years, every page and cover of a publication had to be sent out back and forth to post production houses to clean up the typography, graphics, color and black and white, and pagination before it was sent to prepress. And many, many, many times, more often than not, in prepress there was almost always a lot of arguing and running and sending proofs back and forth about corrections, along with shipping changes, etc. out directly to press when necessary.
The ability to manage .PDF on Macs was manna from heaven. And for quite a few years, Windows desktops could not handle the necessary production and post production work.
You are confusing PostScript and PDF. Although the two are related, they are not the same.
PostScript was first released in 1982, but it was never intended to be rendered for computer displays. It was meant strictly as an output format, for rendering by a compatible printer. And it was output by apps on many platforms, at about the same time that the first PostScript printers were available for purchase.
The first software I know of that could render PostScript on a computer was the open source Ghostscript project, which saw its first release in 1988.
PDF, on the other hand, didn’t begin development (by Adobe) until 1991 and was not released for any platform until 1993, with the release of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Adobe sold this software for pretty much every platform, including Mac, Windows and many Unix platforms.
Apple’s decision to use PDF as the Mac OS X standard metafile format, including designing the Quartz API around Display PostScript and PDF design principles gave Apple a clear advantage, but that didn’t happen until 2001. By that point, PDF was a well-established standard on every computing platform, thanks to the popularity of Adobe Acrobat.
PDF, on the other hand, didn’t begin development (by Adobe) until 1991 and was not released for any platform until 1993, with the release of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader.
And for a while it wasn’t clear that it was going to be the winner in that space. IIRC, Common Ground gave it quite a run for its money, as did a lesser-known third format - which or may not have been Envoy.
And just for completeness, the Wikipedia article you cited for Envoy lists a few more in its footer:
Microsoft’s Open XML Paper Specification, aka “XPS”. I think Microsoft still supports it, although they eventually decided to join everybody else and include PDF support in Windows and Office.