The Apple Macintosh computer was launched in January 1984, a year before the aforementioned LaserWriter, by a high-profile marketing campaign that deployed an advert directed by Ridley Scott and a national premiere during the half-time break of that year's Superbowl.

The first commercially available (and rea­sonably priced [1]) desktop computer with a GUI and mouse, its acknowledged potential amidst the design and graphical arts communities was profound, yet, again, this did not immediately translate into high sales.

While the GUI and graphics handling of the Macintosh were clearly impressive, the quality of its output of images to paper was not considered professional enough by the industry: further development of PostScript was required so that the language could become truly resolution independent. For the combined Macintosh and LaserWriter – its yet-to-be-launched companion printer – to succeed, PostScript had to work flawlessly at 300dpi as well as 1,200dpi [2], the manufacturing-standard print resolution. Adobe tweaked its code to allow for the minute scaling of characters' stem widths so that, regardless of whether content was printed through a laser printer or an industrial typesetting machine, the output would be rendered identically.

The original LaserWriter printer was powered by the industry-standard Canon LBP-CX engine and contained an Adobe-developed, PostScript-enabled processor that freed the Macintosh's limited 128kb RAM to focus on running its memory-hungry GUI software [3]. It was formally introduced in January 1985 as an addition to – and an integral part of – The Macintosh Office24, the concept lauded a year previously as 'freeing office workers from the drudgery of document production' [4].

With the Mac's GUI and near-typeset-quality LaserWriter printer incorporating, amongst other font families, key professional Linotype typefaces, Apple was still not achieving the high sales forecasted a year previously: The Macintosh Office had not yet been embraced by designers and office workers alike, as had been expected. Just as Adobe and Apple technologies had converged at the right time a couple of years previously, another symbiotic partnership was necessary for The Macintosh Office and desktop publishing to succeed.

Notes

1. The Macintosh retailed in 1984 at $2,495. 

2. Pfiffner P., 2003. Inside the publishing revolution: the Adobe story. San Jose: Adobe Press, p.37

3. The LaserWriter required extra processing power in the form of a 12Mhz Motorolla 68000 CPU, 512kb of RAM, and a 1mb frame buffer (Shimada J., 2006. The font wars. [online]).

4. Pfiffner P., 2003. Inside the publishing revolution: the Adobe story. San Jose: Adobe Press, p.37

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).