Today’s episode contains what Stewart Cheifet would later describe as one of the classic “near disasters” involving a product demonstration on The Computer Chronicles. The subject was the first Xerox Color Laser Printer, which was actually a prototype not yet available for sale when this Chronicles episode taped in October 1983. Cheifet recounted the event to Tonya Hall of ZDNet in a November 2020 interview:

We introduced the very first color laser printer on the show by Xerox. I figured it’d be a printer–it was the size of two Volkswagens! We had to take the doors off the studio to get this thing inside. And it took three engineers three hours to get this thing hooked up. And I said, ‘Can we test it now?’ ‘Yeah, let’s test it.’ We went to the print button, hit the print button, and smoke came out of this printer. No output–smoke. I said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get this thing to work, guys.’ Finally, another hour later, they pressed the button and I saw the most gorgeous color output I’ve ever seen in my life from a computer.