Interesting blog entry about switching power supplies and Steve Jobs

Well I remember some 10k$ printers we used to have (Talaris, QMS). They were quirky and awkward; I wrote first Free Software (gnuplot, LaTeX) drivers for them. LW was postscript, which by the way is another modern convenience that Apple contributed largely to establishing. Also, after Apple was done the Canon engine and toners were really all over the place. There may have been cheaper printers, but LW had software and hardware infrastructure that made it a success---this is my point actually, that Apple knows how to _deploy_ technology.

There's a good story here: read the following recollection by Cees Links who was managing the wireless group at Lucent. They had a pretty expensive product line, and Steve came to them and made an offer they could not refuse:

Agreed. While I never met Jobs, I've read enough about him I think I know the personality type -- absolutely smart and creative, but tending to view the world through glasses where it truly seems to them that they were highly unique in what they did and that later on others could only copy them... whereas in reality they weren't nearly so unique and while others were certainly influenced by them, those folks often added their own unique twists as well.

It's almost that slightly-distorted world view that helps them to be successful at times -- they don't spend nearly as much time worrying about what everyone else is doing when they come up with an idea that's clearly a good one; they go with it and push-push-push until it comes to fruition. (Or not... it's interesting to look at lists of failed products as well, e.g.,

These sort of people are often not particularly pleasant to be around if you don't buy into their same vision, BTW. :-)

---Joel

Yes, and I seem to recall it was pretty much HP that was trying its hardest to kill it with their LaserJets? True Adobe PostScript wasn't a cheap option back then, and not requiring it let HP have prices noticeably lower than Apple's... if you could like without PostScript... which DOS and Windows could.

I remember reading that it was the HP inkjet printers where you were back to printing a "band" at a time (but now at "letter quality," As compared to dot matrix printers) and could pause between lines if you needed more processing time or whatever (whereas once the paper starting going on a laser printer, there was no stopping it), and this allowed HP to really reduce the processing needs and memory they put in printers such as the original DeskJet. At that point Adobe saw the writing on the wall that the vast consumer market was going to move towards PC-based rendering and knew that PostScript licenses would quickly become a very small market. (Presumably it was somewhere in there they started all their other software projects, many of which remain quite successful, of course -- Acrobat, Photoshop, Flash, etc.)

For quite some time the LaserWriter was typically more powerful than the computer it was attached to!

---Joel

Thanks Artie; good info there!

Quote from Wikipedia on Markkula: "Markkula served as chairman from 1985 until 1997, when a new board was formed after Jobs returned to the company. As chairman he approved Jef Raskin's 1979 plan to start designing what became the Macintosh, then prevented Jobs from killing the project in favor of his own Lisa."

One has to wonder if Apple would have survived if he hadn't been able to prevent Jobs from killing the Mac?

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Very intriguing question. My dad bought a Lisa (rather seriously overpriced) and used it for years. Had serious problems migrating to the then inferior Mac series. Just the same some data was irretrievably lost in the transition. There was just no compatible application. And some people wonder why there are open standards. Can you say hyper-cards?

?-)

ripped

interesting

happened:

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Palm. See PDA.

?-)

existed

hump

place.

As if LaserJet with PCL from HP didn't exist? BTW PostScript is an Adobe product, see Adobe Type Manager.

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