The original Macintosh computer included two high-speed (for the era)
serial ports that were used for most external connectivity. This included
printers, which had to be adapted for use on the Mac through the addition of such a port, or an adaptor. Any device could be plugged into either port, which meant that some system needed to be used to identify which port had a printer, possibly both. A small desk accessory called
Choose Printer allowed the printer driver and serial port to be selected for the connected printer. It did this by listing known printer drivers, displayed as icons of the printer model in question, and allowing the user to select it by clicking on the icon. The icons were expected to physically resemble the printer in question and were contained in the drivers'
resource fork. At this point the two serial ports appeared, allowing the user to indicate which port that printer was connected to. When Apple introduced the
LaserWriter, its very high cost meant that the only cost-effective way to use it was shared among a small
workgroup of Macintoshes. This necessitated the inclusion of
AppleTalk, a simple networking implementation which used low-cost cabling and the same physical
RS-422 serial port hardware. It was a natural extension of
Choose Printer to include the ability to select the LaserWriter and also which port was used to connect its network connection. As AppleTalk became useful for other types of networking, such as file sharing, the
Choose Printer accessory was renamed to simply
Chooser. The Chooser became the main point to add top-level configuration options for both networking and printing. Apple replaced Chooser with
Network Browser in
Mac OS 9 and, starting with
Mac OS X 10.0, by integrated networking features in the
Finder. For the printing functions, they were found in the separate Print Center (10.0–10.2) and
Printer Setup Utility (10.3–10.4) applications and in the
Print & Fax (10.3–10.6),
Print & Scan (10.7–10.8) and
Printers & Scanners (10.9 and later) panes in System Preferences (10.0–12) and System Settings (13 and later) applications. ==References==