said, “I want to bring Steve Jobs over and see what you guys are doing.” So they
came over, we went through the same spiel, and Steve said, “I’ve got this computer
coming out called the Macintosh,” which he showed us, and he said, “so I
don’t need a computer. And I have a deal with Canon on the laser printer. But
the development team trying to interface between the computer and printer is
just failing miserably. Why don’t you sell me your company?” We said, “Steve,
we’re not for sale, we’re really out...

didn’t have a couple of business deals in hand, they would be extremely difficult,
if not impossible, to negotiate with.
We found that we were outgrowing our facilities in Mountain View, so after
about a year, we moved into a larger building on Embarcadero across from the
Palo Alto Golf Club. By about the fall of 1984, we had the LaserWriter pretty
well completed and we ran into a hiccup. Steve had gone to his annual sales
meeting in Hawaii with the senior sales management at Apple, and it was the
first time...

that we developed.
So the product launch went out and it was very well received, but as we
began to track sales, while there was the initial pent-up demand, as it got
toward summer, the sales began to drop off. Everybody got pretty worried
about what was happening. At that time, Apple was marketing their computers
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...

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...

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...