3. Apple

In 1979, Apple, a successful young company in which Xerox had been among the first to invest, was developing its Lisa computer, the second commercial machine to utilise a Graphical User Interface [1]. Both Xerox and Apple knew that success lay in being able to precisely render an image visible on-screen on to a printed page without being confined to just one printer, despite Xerox having in Interpress this very ability in development.

Apple's founding executive, the late Steve Jobs, had in the Lisa a product that he knew could change the world of office communications; however, poor sales of the computer did not vindicate this perspective. While Apple's rendition of the Graphical User Interface was a revelation in the world of green-on-black ASCII display text, it was to be the Lisa's successor, the seminal Macintosh, that would ultimately change that world. Seybold, who was keenly aware of the GUI progress Apple was making, realised the possibilities of a fusion with PostScript, and in 1983 he introduced Jobs to Warnock and Geschke.

Apple at this time had begun work on developing the Laser-Writer – its own version of the laser printer – in partnership with Canon, the leading printer manufacturer of the time, and so the concept of incorporating accurate page-description coding into the processor of a printer, thus freeing the mainframe hardware's capacity, was a conveniently timed breakthrough.

According to Geschke, Jobs is understood to have said at this meeting [2]:

I don't need the computer. I don't need the printer. I need the software.

From that moment, Adobe, whose entire business had been modelled on manufacturing PostScript-enabled output devices, ceased to be a hardware company and became instead a software developer, producing the code by which such machines could be driven.

Notes

At $17,000, the 1981 Xerox Star computer displayed bitmapped text as black-on-white and printed using Interpress, the Xerox PARC PDL. It was the first commercial system to incorporate a GUI, windows-operating platform, mouse, and Ethernet connection, and it inspired an industry before failing commercially.
Pfiffner P., 2003. Inside the publishing revolution: the Adobe story. San Jose: Adobe Press, p.34

Tom O’Reilly worked in the Academic Books Production department of Cambridge University Press, 2007–2014.

This blog comprises excerpts from his book What You See Is What You Get: Desktop Publishing And The Production Revolution at Cambridge University Press (1980–1996).