On Aug 27, 2012, at 5:26 AM, Joseph McAllister wrote: > > On Aug 25, 2012, at 15:27 , Brian Walters wrote: > >> Quoting Bob Sullivan <rf.sulli...@gmail.com>: >> >>> Darren, >>> Some of us still hold a grudge on Apple. >>> We remember our first Apple PC's >>> and how everything Apple cost 2X what the IBM machines cost, >>> how nothing - printer, disc drives, monitors, memory had to be Apple >>> or it wouldn't work! >> >> >> >> Thanks, Bob. I've also got a long memory. I was trying to frame a reply >> along those lines and you've saved me the trouble :-)> > > Those of us who have used Pentax all our lives, for whatever reason, lens > compatibility, rugged and innovative products, should know better. Apple > would not be where they are today if they didn't provide compatibility with > the hardware tools their customers wanted or needed to do their work. Even > today though, with a pant-load of software capable of easily porting "PC" > programs to "Macs", a large percentage of companies don't bother. They are > running the same hardware, idiots. Port! I think it's because so many liked > to fiddle as kids, so they went to the dark side and got PCs. So they could. > Now that they are older, these kids are scared they can't learn anything new, > so they shy away from Apple. While they were sneering at us, Apple stock sold > for $13 a share. Whose sneering now? > > The first use I got out of my first Apple Product, a ][+, was writing CP/M > code to make my Epson Printer listen to the Apple. Pretty simple really. > About two lines of hex to tell the computer that is was attached to something > other than a line printer. I learned Wozniac's method of writing data to > floppy disks, and would repair friends disk with errors by printing out all > the code on the disk, finding where the error was by following the sectors > sequentially as they jumped around all over the directory, mapping it > (tedious!) until I discovered what was missing, or garbled, and repairing it. > When Apple computers (Mac) went to 48, then 64 bit processes, I gave up on > that endeavor. > > When the Mac came out in 1984, it was shortly followed, thanks to Adobe > selling Jobs the font technology used by Apple Laser Printers, which put tens > of thousands of printers and font designers working at home. "Desktop > Printing" became a buzzword in those years. That was the only time I can > think of that for a year or two you had to buy an Apple printer to do the > job. Soon HP and Brother came out with similar printers, which ALL cost too > much because of the very high per unit prices Adobe charged Apple and the > others to use ROMs running their patented font drawing software whose name I > cannot think of now. > > That lasted for a while, then Apple addressed the costs by coming out with > their own (or purchased) fonts design called TrueType that gave damn near the > quality of Adobe's system. Apple gave those away, followed by most all fonts > being converted into TrueType. This took the wind out of Adobe's profit > column. They had saved enough money to buy Aldus and it's PageMaker layout > program, which put me out of a job in the Aldus division that was > troubleshooting PageMaker 4.0 against Microsoft Windows version 3.0, (which > was really vers. 1.1 which indicated how far behind in the GUI movement they > were, so they renamed it 3.0) that was taking forever to get out of Alpha. > Alpha, Beta, back to Alpha kept a paycheck in my pocket. My team was kept > busy by designing a little text editor for PageMaker while we waited on > Gate's boys and girls to get their shit together. We called it Ted. We gave > it rudimentary graphical capabilities which gave me a few more weeks as we > built a series of graphics showing what it could do to be used in promotion. > > But I digress. Apple's concept practically from the start, especially when > Jobs was at the helm, was to sell products that, even though complex and > innovative in their design, made few demands on their users. "They just > worked" "Plug and Play" etc. One paid a price for this, of course. In return, > Apple Mac users never had to open their equipment or learn how it went > together. Some did of course. I made many friends and grew a decent client > list as an Apple Consultant after starting one of the first Apple clubs in > Fredericksburg, VA in 1980, called the "Rappahanock Apple Group". Our > newsletter, a dot matrix gem, was mastheaded "the RAG". I still have the > plaque they gave me when I moved away to come to Seattle in 1988. > > When I was let go at Aldus/Adobe, I went into business as a consultant. Never > got rich. Made a few bucks selling and installing telecommunications systems, > hawking "First Class BBS" s/w out of Toronto for a few years in Seattle, > turning the Downtown Business Users Groups (dBUG)'s single line BBS in 1989 > into a 22 line BBS by 1994. Big thick cable of 2-pair dropped into my house, > with room inside of it for 48 lines. Sadly the local switch could not handle > any more connections. I was voted off the board of directors in 1995 because > they did not believe the club needed to transition to a something called the > Internet websight to serve the members. The politics and treachery of one of > the board members did me in, as being a threat to the group by trying to run > them into the ground financially. Funny butt. They went ahead and did exactly > what I had proposed within six months. Pulled all those expensive 56k baud > modems out of my house too. > > Fascinating. I happened to be in the right place at the right time -- 1987 I believe -- to be the writer on the first ad agency team to produce product brochures for an automaker using desktop publishing. We used the only machines available that could do the job: $10,000 Mac II boxes with 8 megs of memory and 8 megahertz processors. It was a one-page-at-a-time struggle, with photos stripped in by the printer, but we did it. Two years later, the Macs had advanced tenfold, and the job was simple. Some of they team left the Mercedes agency to found the Designery in Long Beach. They became wealthy building books for many clients. I wanted to make television commercials and failed to realize the profit opportunity on the desktop side of things.
> -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
