Talk:IBM 3800

We need some wikicommons images for this product. I also plan to add a section on technical innovations achieved with this printer. Luckydog429 (talk) 02:08, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

3812, 3816, etc.
It's amazing how little info about these other printers is on the web. Peter Flass (talk) 03:02, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

I agree.. I think we should turn this into an IBM Laser Printer page. AVandewerdt (talk) 04:12, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

First laser printer
As noted in Laser printing, the Xerox 1200 was the first commercial laser printer. came out three years before the IBM 3800 and 4 years before the 9700. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:43, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the Xerox appears to be first, but the Wikipedia article referenced has two contradictory statements. The ComputerWorld article appears to suggest the Xerox printer was not working till later 1974 or even 1975 and was only offline. The Xerox blog is from a corporate social media account. I have made some edits to try and handle this. AVandewerdt (talk) 07:33, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

I found this from Xerox in 2017:

https://www.news.xerox.com/news/40-year-anniversay-of-the-Xerox-9700-and-its-innovation

"Forty years ago, the launch of the Xerox 9700 – the company’s first commercial laser printer – gave rise to the digital printing industry,"

AVandewerdt (talk) 09:48, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

It looks strongly like the 1200 was not a 'laser' printer. Am still looking for a clear technical description of the 1200 printhead. I found a really good one for the PPS... AVandewerdt (talk) 09:40, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Actually its clear the 1200 was not a laser printer... it used an optical print head... I suspect of the kind IBM experimented with using a CRT to expose the photoconductor. AVandewerdt (talk) 10:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Speed of 1403 and 3211
A recent edit question the speeds of the 1403 versus the 3211. The 1403 models N1 and 3 are rated at up to 1400 LPM. The 3211 is rated at up to 2500 LPM. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 10:10, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

That 3211 doc in Bitsavers is the one that made me decide to validate the facts. On page 5 it says: "The IBM 3211 Printer (Figure 1) is a high-speed printer with speeds of 2,000 lines per minute,single spacing,using a 48-position character set"

On page 7 it says: "Speeds up to 2,500 lines per minute with single spacing are possible. " However that required a 27 character array, which seems really unlikely in the real world. A 48 character set seems far more real world (although I am making that statement without written evidence).

So it seems clear the 3211 is the faster printer in 1972 based on those two documents at 2000 lpm. I wanted to validate if that has changed at all by April 1975 The full page IBM ad in Computerworld on page 6 says it can go 13,360 lines per minute, six times faster than the fastest IBM printer. Which means we are looking for a number around 2226, so the 3211 seems the best candidate. AVandewerdt (talk) 22:46, 2 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Did you really mean to have the same indentation level as the original text? Would you object if I shifted it right?
 * I've only encountered the P and Tarrangements, with most work printed on P. I suspect that P and Q are most common, but don't know of a source with a headcount. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:24, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad. I didn’t mean to make life difficult. AVandewerdt (talk) 20:00, 3 December 2021 (UTC)