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There are more than 50 companies making printers ranging from the common office names to specialists making machines for engineers, digital presses for printworks and transaction printers for banks.
Most people have heard of half a dozen printer makers - Hewlett Packard, Brother, Canon, Epson, Lexmark and Xerox perhaps. These are amongst the bigger companies.
All of these companies are old established but their involvement in printers primarily started in the 1970s.
Hewlett Packard was a scientific instrument and calculator maker and seems to have consciously decided to make printers in 1979 - it now has about half of the printer market. HP developed its own line of inkjet printers and popularised laser printers.
Brother was primarily a sewing-machine maker; they and Epson were involved in early dot-matrix printer making because it was a precision machining task.
Xerox developed Chester Carlson's patents for photocopying and its machines became essential office equipment in the 1960s. In 1970 Xerox developed early laser printers.
Canon was one of several Japanese companies that developed their own photocopier designs in the 1980s as the Xerox patents expired. Canon also developed it's "bubblejet" ink.
Lexmark developed in the mid 1990s from IBMs printer division. Printing was very important in mainframe and mini-computing so IBM was a major printer maker. Where IBM focused on the corporate market Lexmark has broadened its aim to small business and the home market.
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There are around a hundred companies making printers
Until the 1970s information and paper were just about synonymous and had been so for more than 500 years. Index cards, filing cabinets, library stacks Computers were rising in importance and big government departments would boast of how many miles of tape-rack they needed but the only way to really examine the information aquired was on a print-out.
Green screen terminals were the first big change. Storing and retrieving information could use the screen rather than paper. Information could be ecorded immediately and up to date. Records read from the screen saved paper and improved the workflow. Impressive changes in the cost of disk storage meant that centralised systems could record everything an organisation did - at least in theory. Terminals quickly spread in government and business - one per office, then one per desk.
Interestingly the green-screen terminal admitted to some faults. Screens were green because they used a long persistence phospor which is less tiring on the eyes. The typical terminal had an 80 column display and this wasn't quite enough for some tasks so a later generation had a 132 column mode to immitate a page of print-out. A problem with terminals was that the more information there was on the screen the less comprehensible it became. To overcome this programmers started highlighing, drawing boxes