LaserJet History

• The first laser printer brought to market for the IBM PC was the LaserJet in 1984. It used a print engine developed by Canon. The initial designs embedded fonts in memory in the printer as they were intended to produce text with crisp edges. As the cost of memory has decreased and the graphical capabilities of the OS and the computer have increased, the LaserJet has responded. Continual advancements in print speed, print density and output quality mark the printer line's advancement.
  
  

Network Printing

• HP introduced the first mass-market network printer, the IIISi. It had an internal Ethernet card that enabled direct connection of the printer to a network for sharing, rather than attaching the printer to one specific machine that had to be left running so that the printer was accessible. As networking in the home and office has become more common, many of the current LaserJet models are network-ready, with internal NICs ready to be assigned an IP address and receive print jobs.
  
  

PCL Support

• The HP LaserJet printers have utilized the company's Printer Control Language since the very first model. PCL is a set of escape codes used to control the parameters and instructions of a print job sent to the LaserJet. The codes are embedded in the document before they are sent to the printer, which can quickly interpret them.