While people today enjoy the fine picture quality of the mobile phone, there is also a field of products: printing devices, which have always had a very high output accuracy and for which countless people have invented a range of ways to get us better output quality.

The result of decades of competition is a $100 billion-a-year printing market. There are so many different types of printing products historically that it would be impossible to write too long, so here we will try to keep it as simple as possible by looking at the different types of printing and how they have evolved to what they are today.

Before the advent of printing, there was only photocopying. Why? Because the other end of printing, the computer, didn't have much graphics capability yet and being a rare product, was expensive and therefore only used to perform calculations.

The computer of this time did not output the usual text and graphics of today, but rather a series of cards with holes in them.

The significance of these holes was not to form patterns per se, but rather data storage and the input and output of printing instructions, something called a Punched Card, in this sense, a disc with grooves deep enough to record data is considered an evolution in another direction from the early input-output devices.

The emergence of the needle printer

The principle of the needle printer is simple: the needle strikes the ribbon with the color material, leaving a dot on the paper surface like a copy, and the combination of these dots forms a pattern, which is the same for many printing devices.

The company that invented the world's first needle printer was OKI in Japan, the product was called OKI Wiredot and was born in 1968. In 2013, OKI received an award from the Information Processing Society of Japan for this invention. The working principle of the needle printer dictates that it is not very fast.

Early needle printers were 180 cps, today's products are just a few hundred cps, nearly half a century, the printing speed has not changed qualitatively, the reason for this is the limits of the machinery.

The big contribution that needle printers brought to the industry was when Centronics approached Japan's Brother OEM needle printer in 1970, to target the low-end market, so the introduction of a very low-cost interface - and port.

For many years afterward, the parallel port was the main interface for connecting printers until the advent of USB.

When it comes to the origins of laser printing, it is important to mention the great company Xerox, which invented so many ground-breaking products in Pala Alto that have influenced today.

Graphic interface interfaces, mice, photocopiers, and the laser printers we use today. Even in American English, Xerox literally means photocopy.

The story begins in the 1960s, Gary Starkweather in Xerox's R&D department came up with the idea of projecting a laser beam directly onto the photoconductor drum for drawing.

Gary Starkweather was soon working at Xerox's PARC on how to use a laser beam to image directly onto a Xerox 7000 photoconductor drum, which was called the Scanned Laser Output Terminal (SLOT), and there was no such concept as today's printing language, so a library of characters had to be added to make this possible.

A library of characters was added to enable printing.

In the late '70s and early '80s' computers were '70s'g miniaturized with the creation of the Mac and the first IBM PC. So the question arose.

Could printers be miniaturized too? Canon in the Pacific West was also working on how to use laser printing technology for imaging and also introduced its first generation of printers, the Canon LBP-10. Canon's work did not stop there, Canon was also actively working on how to miniaturize the laser print engine.