On Aug 26, 2009, at 02:52 , Eckehard Wegner wrote:
I think there will be no way around forking out some goosh in the general direction of Adobe in the long
run.
I will say one thing about Adobe. They go to great lengths to make sure everything works as it should.
When I worked at Aldus on Pagemaker 4.0 (19 years ago) they set up a networked print shop in a large room there and had a crew staffing it 16 hours a day to print sample files from PM 4 beta on a large selection of printers, Postscript and not, color and B&W, even an offset press back at their shop. All to make sure not only that PageMaker was performing correctly, but to look for Postscript errors in the various fonts we were going to be distributing with the product.
Of course, they were also plotting on taking over the whole company at the time, but waited until Aldus spent the money to buy SIlicon Beach Software and After Hours Software.
An interesting aside. In late 1983, while employed just outside the beltway in northern Virginia on "government work", and a six year fanatic of Apple's products, I took a part time job in a Fredericksburg computer store some months before the Macintosh was introduced in February of 1984. One of my co-workers was a reservist Marine, with all the haircut and demeanor of a lifer. But he was personable, and funny, and I was ex-Navy, so we got along quite well. I was given the task of teaching this guy everything I knew about Apple's personal computers at that time, and he was to teach me all he knew about CP/M and DOS on the Osborne, Kaypro, HP, and Compaq Portable or desktop units. We spent all our spare time (and that was a lot) delving in to the secrets inside these early wonders, and then along came the Macintosh (128). It made a lot of sense to me, with all it's innovations and graphical interface (GUI) and tiny little 128k hard shelled floppies (soon to become 256k, then 512k, and finally 1.44 meg a few years later) one of which held the OS, MacWrite, MacDraw, and MacPaint, plus a few utilities for formatting.
Anyhow, this marine, Charlie Jackson was his name, left after a few months of fiddling with the Mac, and I never heard from him again. Now we go back to 1990 and the ceremony in the alley behind Aldus on 1st Avenue in Seattle where we informally welcomed the top employees of this company Paul Brainerd had purchased from San Diego, CA., Silicon Beach Software. I spotted a familiar face in the crowd, and walked over to Charlie, who greeted me warmly and thanked me for all the time I had spent with him learning the Macintosh computer.
Our conversation was interrupted by Mr. Brainerd at the mike talking about what a great thing for Aldus this acquisition was, how wonderful their products were, and what an innovative team would be working alongside us (though remaining at their facilities in San Diego). Then he introduced us to the team, starting with the founder of Silicon Beach Software, and the brains behind it's success, Charlie Jackson!
I was totally floored when Charlie turned and grinned at me, then walked up to the podium and addressed the group. Later, during lunch, we sat together and he caught me up on his adventures since leaving Virginia. He had actually gone directly out to San Diego and started gathering some friends who brainstormed the best way to get in to the computer game. Charlie wanted to do something educational, fun, and innovative using software. The rest is history. Silicon Beach was started that same year, named after the buzzword applied to the San Jose area, Silicon Valley.
How about that! If it doesn’t excite you, This thing that you see, Why in the world, Would it excite me? —Jay Maisel Joseph McAllister [email protected] -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
