The 1984 Macintosh Ad
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsjMmAqmblQ&ab_channel=BloombergOriginals>
shown during the Jan 22 Superbowl teased the Jan 26, 1984 introduction of
the Mac at the  Apple Shareholders meeting (I don't have the video).  Jobs
did a demo and then a panel discussion with 8 members of the software and
hardware team  The whole presentation including the developer panel was
repeated 4 days later at a Boston Computer Society meeting. Our Owen
Densmore is one of those 8 as the software engineer lured from Xerox to
work on WYSIWIG printing and embedding a software rendering engine in the
printer itself. here's the time codes of these discussions

   - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=1336 – Jobs explaining
   the printer
   - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=1741 - Owen introduction
   - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=2379 - Randy Wigginton
   nods to Owen’s printer work
   - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=2683 - Printing question
   answered by Jobs and Owen
   - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=3352 - Owen gets up to
   get a floppy disk :]
   - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=3744 - Owen comments on
   the Mac’s multi-tasking abilities

Owen left Apple to join Sun in the last half of the 80s and worked on NeWS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS>- postscipt-based windowing system.
NeXT would later adopt instead of QuickDraw for its windowing system.

When Jobs was at NeXT, he gave this talk at MIT Sloan School
<https://infinite.mit.edu/video/steve-jobs-next-computer-corp-sloan-distinguished-speaker-series>
~8
years later. In the talk, I find his observations interesting esp wrt to
how important printing and desktop publishing would be for the Mac and they
didn't predict it.

*When we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing
when we created the Mac. Sounds funny, because that turned out to be
the Mac's compelling advantage, right? The thing that it did not one
and a
half or two times better than everything else, but four or five times
better than anything else, where you had to have one. We never
anticipated it. We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers, but
we never thought about pagemaker, that whole industry really coming
down to the desktop. Maybe we weren't smart enough.*

*But we were smart enough to see it start to happen nine to 12 months
later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to
focus on desktop publishing, and it became the Trojan horse that
eventually got the Mac into corporate America, where it could show its
owners all the other wonderful things it could do.*

Apple has Owen to thank for that!

Redfish, btw, was an Apple VAR in the early 90s helping commercial printers
to prepress - digital scanning, digital halftoning, color separation,
digital imaging (early photoshop), plate-ready film printing, and page
layout (QuarkXpress and PageMaker). Of course, I didn't know Owen yet - I
would first meet him at the 2000 Complex Systems Summer School where we
were both students from the BusNet. I was from BiosGroup and Owen from Sun
R&D Labs.

Mad respect for your changing the world, Owen! And you ain't done yet. :-)

-Stephen
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
stephen.gue...@simtable.com
stephengue...@fas.harvard.edu
Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
<https://hwpi.harvard.edu/eps-visualization-research-laboratory/home>
mobile: (505)577-5828
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