On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 11:30 AM Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
> My copy of Glenn Reid's 1990 Thinking in PostScript > <https://w3-o.cs.hm.edu/users/ruckert/public_html/compiler/ThinkingInPostScript.pdf> > sat on my shelf for two decades singing a siren song that wasn't ever quite > strong enough for me to give it my full attention for the few weeks/months > I believe it deserved. > > Someday (if humanity survives another century, or interstellar visitors > bother to crack our rusty harddrives) this will all be as much fun as the > vestigal (aka "junk") DNA we started finding when we started ubiquitous > DNA/RNA sequencing. It must all be "good for something"? Right? Clearly > was at one time! > > Fascinating that anyone (besides me) is even discussing such things 30 > years later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946 > 40 years earlier: From the same site, here's the first public demo of the Mac in Boston in 1984. with Steve Jobs and the full Mac team onstage. I think Owen is the hero of the group, though I'm biased :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116 >From that site: He called out Owen Densmore for writing the printing routines at 10m45s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqQJ-VnJ2uc&t=10m45s And Owen answered a question about printing at 15m: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqQJ-VnJ2uc&t=15m Owen is a brilliant programmer and "User Interface Flower Child", who led the "Print Shop" group at Apple that created the printing architecture for Apple's Lisa and Macintosh hardware, working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers on the LaserWriter. Check out Steve Job's MIT Sloan Business school when he was at NEXT referencing the importance of Owen's work that became desktop publishing on Apple which was the Trojan Horse that launched Apple into mainstream corporate: https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-talks-leaving-apple-lessons-in-management-1992-mit-lecture-video-2018-5 On the Macintosh's killer app and how he didn't see it coming (10:30): "We never anticipated desktop publishing when we created the Mac. Sounds funny because that turned out to be the Mac's compelling advantage, the thing it did, not 1.5 or 2 times better than everything else, but 4, 5 times better than anything else, where you had to had one." "We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers but we never thought about Pagemaker, that whole industry really coming down on the desktop. Maybe we weren't smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it happen 9-12 months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing, and it became the Trojan Horse that finally got the Mac into corporate America.
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