How HP’s first ThinkJet printer brought office printing to the masses 40 years ago
The HP ThinkJet brought compact inkjet printing to the masses and consigned the dot-matrix printer to history
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The concept of inkjet printing was a fixture throughout the 20th century – with research starting way back in the 50s with a JapaneseCanonemployee, Ichiro Endo, who proposed the idea for a “bubble jet” printer that could translate the images you see on a computer to a printed physical page. But it wasn’t untilHP’s ThinkJet printer launched in 1984 that inkjet printing truly entered the mainstream – and with it the dreaded ink cartridge.
One of the first commercial inkjet printers was the IBM 6640, a device designed to offer printing to offices, when it was launched in 1976. It was part of a handful of bulky, heavy and impractical devices that launched around this time – and offered inkjet printing in professional contexts.
But nearly ten years later, HP brought out a more compact machine for personal printing at home. Measuring 11.5 x 8 x 3.5 inches, the black-and-white printer would have set you back $495 – $1,478.45 by today’s standards. Its ink cartridges, which were available for $8 a pop ($24) were good for 500 pages too.
The dot-matrix disruptor
Its name is derived from the process of ‘thermal inkjet’ printing – and came about when an engineer working on a completely different project noticed something interesting about the effects of electricity. When they were making thin-film technology for integrated circuit applications, they were testing how a thin silicon film would respond when stimulated with electricity. To the engineer’s surprise, the electricity superheated the medium and droplets of fluid lying beneath the film were expelled. This,according to HP, inspired the idea for finely controlled jets of fluid in a compact inkjet printer.
This invention was a game-changer. While, as we’ve mentioned, inkjet printing was in force across enterprises – these machines could only print large characters rather crudely. Now, it was clear this technology could be reduced in size and operate with relatively little power compared to its business-centric cousin.
It also marked an end to the dot-matrix printer, which was replaced a technology that was better in almost every metric – to the extent it’s still one of the most popular types of printer today. For instance, dot-matrix printers typically printed at 120 characters per second, while the HP ThinkJet printed at 150 characters per second. The former technology also emits high-pitch scratching sounds, too, while the inkjet printer emits a “nondistracting hum that is quiet enough not to interfere with telephone conversations,” according toInfoWorld(1984).
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Keumars Afifi-Sabet is the Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.
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