Founders at Work.pdf

288 Founders at Work
point sizes and different typefaces, but you had to design for different imaging
devices. If you begin doing all that multiplication, you could hire all of the hightech
workers in China and not keep up. It wasn’t going to work.
Livingston: So you created scalable fonts?
Geschke: We came up with the idea of using a pure mathematical description
of the outline of the type and then worked on some sophisticated algorithms
about how to decide which bits to turn on and which ones not to turn on to give
the highest-quality rendering on the particular device. That was really the
breakthrough technology that differentiated PostScript from anything that preceded
it, including Interpress.
Livingston: When you were working on Interpress, what were some of the big
ideas that you couldn’t believe that Xerox didn’t appreciate?
Geschke: At a conceptual level, it was the same idea as PostScript. From any
computer running any kind of application software, you could, over the network,
interface to any printer at any resolution, any characteristics, and be guaranteed
that the file would transport between the two. For a company that’s in the printing
business, such as Xerox, that meant they only had to provide a single digital
interface on the front end and they could connect to anything. The converse
was also true for software writers, because they could print to this PostScript
string and it would look good on any PostScript printer. And the same was true
for platform vendors like Apple and Microsoft: they only had to write one print
driver to be able to generate output for any PostScript device—or would have
for a Xerox device running Interpress.
Livingston: Did you build the hardware for the printer too?
Geschke: We helped design it in concert with people at Apple. We did not
manufacture it, but we did know some of the design characteristics that it
needed to have in order to be able to handle both the rasterization of PostScript
and some things about how it had to control the engine to get the best possible
output. But that was a shared piece of work and the hardware belonged to
Apple. Eventually we did do some hardware design, and we would offer the
designs to our OEM customers so that they wouldn’t have to start with a blank
sheet of paper—so they could get to market faster. But we never really went
into the manufacturing business.
Livingston: Why did Apple and DEC have such difficulty in creating what you
guys did?
Geschke: I think it was partly a lack of understanding of the requirements of
the printing and publishing industry. Even though John’s background wasn’t as
closely tied to it as mine, he had worked for a company called Evans &
Sutherland who did contract development for a lot of high-tech companies
including RR Donnelley in Chicago, which was at one time the largest printer
in the United States, maybe in the world. So he had a pretty good appreciation
of what was involved. Plus, with his graphics background, he understood
the issues about the conversion from an abstract definition in terms of the