on 2012-08-27 3:26 Joseph McAllister wrote
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.
i think you mean "Desktop Publishing", and of course PostScript is the page description (and font-drawing) language; i was in on the ground floor of the movement, abandoning software development for a while, and producing books & magazines, then working in prepress shops; PostScript printers were expensive, but for what they enabled they were affordable; for years the masters for Zymurgy magazine and all the books of the Association of Brewers (my second DTP job) were made on a LaserWriter Plus, and then a Newgen 400dpi printer, at huge cost-savings
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.
it did impact Adobe, but at the time PostScript fonts still competed well with TrueType and there was not a wholesale "conversion" to TrueType; it was years before prepress companies were comfortable accepting jobs using Truetype fonts; Adobe still doesn't produce TrueType fonts, and its catalog of PostScript-based fonts is still the gold standard, though many of the fonts are licensed from other foundries which do produce TrueType versions, it matters little in the end because OpenType is agnostic to TrueType and PostScript
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