Livingston: Did 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 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
mathematics of a shape and how to get that into raster data that would drive a
bitmap printer or a bitmap display.
It was a combination of all those skills and backgrounds that he and I had
that put us in a unique position. And then the good fortune to get a business
deal with two or three very important customers early on.
Livingston: Did your work at PARC on the programming language Mesa give
you any critical insights that helped you make PostScript better?
Geschke: Not directly. Mesa was very focused on conventional programming,
the kind that was done to build operating systems. It had one characteristic that
conceptually is similar to PostScript, in that in both Mesa and PostScript, we
had the idea that you didn’t have to program at the level of the machine. In
PostScript, you can program at a higher level, in a language that is more in tune
with what you wanted to print as opposed to how it printed. In Mesa, we actually
developed both a programming language for programmers to organize
large, complex programs and a machine that would take the output of that language
and operate on it very efficiently. That was built into the Star workstation
| ← Geschke: No, PostScript | that Xerox introduced → |