that we developed....
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 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?
| ← didn’t have a | Geschke: No, PostScript → |