Founders at Work.pdf

Charles Geschke 287
and the LaserWriter around a marketing program called the Macintosh office,
which was an attempt to take IBM head-on. And frankly, it was not going well.
It was very hard to replace all those feet on the street in corporate America,
“You’ve never lost your job buying IBM,”—all the stuff you’ve heard.
Fortunately, there was a young marketing guy at Apple named John Scull,
who was aware of what was going on (as were we) at Aldus up in Seattle,
because PageMaker came out at the same time as the LaserWriter did. He
came up with the idea of getting the three companies—Apple, Aldus, and
Adobe—together to put together a marketing campaign called “desktop
publishing.” That had a huge impact on Apple, Adobe, and Aldus, and on
the publishing industry, and completely turned around the fortunes of the
Macintosh and the LaserWriter.
Livingston: Because the desktop publishing idea was brand new?
Geschke: Yes. Up until then, people used basically analog, labor-intensive technologies.
It turns out my grandfather and father were both letterpress photo
engravers, and so I knew what it was like to work with the etching baths and the
copper plates and all of the emulsions and everything. It was very toxic work,
very expensive and very labor intensive. What we were beginning to demonstrate
pretty early on was that you could do as good, if not better, quality using
a computer and PostScript than you could with the old analog technologies.
Desktop publishing became very popular. For an investment of a few thousand
dollars you could, in effect, be your own printer and publisher. So it
opened up a whole lot of new businesses. As graphic artists and designers began
to learn how to use a computer, we brought out products like Adobe Illustrator.
All of a sudden, the whole industry began to move, and within less than a
decade the entire printing and publishing industry went from the old analog
world completely over to the digital world. That was a tremendous thing to see,
and of course it was a huge benefit to us.
Livingston: When you first started, you planned to build the computer, the
printer, and the programming language that would make everything talk. Did
you have a name for it before it was called PostScript?
Geschke: No, PostScript was the name that we picked shortly after we started
our business.
Livingston: Did you use the same ideas that were in Interpress?
Geschke: There were several things that weren’t done in Interpress. It wasn’t
really a programming language the way PostScript was; it was a little more
static. And in the design of Interpress, we never were able to figure out how to
deal with type. In the world before Adobe, the presumption was that to get
high-quality type at laser printer resolutions, let alone ink jet resolutions, you
would have to hand-tune bitmaps for every type style and every point size.
Extremely labor intensive. Also, what would look good on a laser printer
wouldn’t necessarily look good on an ink jet printer and probably not look at all
good on a computer screen. So in fact you not only had to design for different