From room-sized machines to barely an inconvenience on your desk, laser printers are in nearly every office. But where did they start? Tom explores the origins of the laser printer.
Featuring Tom Merritt.
MP3
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Episode transcript:
Gary Starkweather was a scientist. Optical physics or “optics” was his specialty. That’s the study of how light interacts with matter. It could sound boring to some, I suppose. But it’s not boring to other physicists.
And it wasn’t boring to David DiFrancesco. David had spent some long nights at Xerox PARC working on 8-bit frame buffers with Dick Shoup. There he had gotten to know Starkweather during some of those long nights of research.
Starkweather knew a lot of stuff, including how to make digital matte film effects work. The most famous of these is the matte painting, of course, but there are other ways of working digital elements into a shoot. Like lasers. In fact, Starkweather had advised the embryonic Lucasfilm on the original Star Wars.
DiFrancesco was trying to learn everything he could about laser printing on film. How to take those digital effects and print them right on the film so it looked like the laser was shooting right out of the gun. Except DiFrancesco had bigger ambitions. He was trying to figure out how to print the whole movie. DiFrancesco had been a founding member of the Lucasfilm Computer Division that Starkweather advised. With their shared history at Xerox PARC and on Star Wars, DiFrancesco turned to Starkweather again as he was helping Pixar get started.
It was the right idea. In 1994, David DiFrancesco and Gary Starkweather of Pixar joined Scott Squires of ILM and Gary Demos and Dan Cameron of Information International in receiving a Technical Oscar for their pioneering work in the field of film input scanning.
How did optics physicist Gary Starkweather end up getting an Oscar? It began a long time ago, well 1969, in a galaxy far, far away, Upstate New York.
Let’s help you Know a Little More about the laser printerContinue reading “About Laser Printers”
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