do that.
Shortly after that, I was given the opportunity to start up a new laboratory
within PARC focused primarily in graphics and printing technologies, and one
of my first jobs was to hire a chief scientist to be the head researcher. I had
known John Warnock by reputation. In fact, he gave a talk when I was a graduate
student at Carnegie Mellon. He was just finishing his thesis at the
University of Utah in graphics. But we never really met or spent any time
together. So I called him up, we had lunch. He had a beard, I had a beard; he
had three kids (two boys and a girl), I had three kids (two boys and a girl);
he refereed soccer, I refereed soccer. We hit it off. I made him a job offer,
which he accepted, and he interviewed at PARC and became the chief scientist
in this laboratory.
We began to focus on the problem of how to take a variety of different
printers—different speeds, different characteristics, some black-and-white,
some color (we already knew about ink jet technology even though it wasn’t
broadly available at the time)—how do you integrate that all so that any computer
could talk to any printer? We did a project for Xerox called Interpress. It
was actually the precursor of PostScript, which was the first technology developed
at Adobe. The idea was that you could build a network of printers and
computers and they could all talk to one another.
We showed Interpress to Xerox management and they were extremely
excited about it. They said, “We’re going to promote this as an internal standard
that we’re going to use on all our products.” I said, “That’s fantastic. When can
we start the marketing program to go out and talk to the world about that?”
They said, “Oh, wait a minute. At Xerox it takes us at least 7 years to bring a
product out.” I said, “7 years? In our industry, that’s two to three generations.
This will be very old news by the time you get a product out, and the world will
have passed us by.” “Sorry, that’s how fast we can get a product out and so that’s
what we’re going to do.”
That made both John and me very frustrated. We were talking one day and
he said, “I’m going to go and see if there’s a way that we can take our ideas and
start our own business.” His thesis advisor at the University of Utah was a man
by the name of Dave Evans, and Dave sat on the board of Hambrecht & Quist,
a venture capital company up in San Francisco. He introduced us to Bill
Hambrecht, and we went up and met with him. The idea that we talked about
was to build laser printers and typesetting equipment that could produce not