[FRIAM] Owen Densmore, father of object-oriented postcript in NeWS object.ps, desktop publishing and relation to NEXT [was: Re: naive question]

[Gillian Densmore]

Here's a fun speculative question to: how different would the computing
landscape look now: if apple dug clones, and decided they were worth it?
and what if BeOS did become apples new OS?--I feel like I aged myself.

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 8:50 AM Gillian Densmore <gil.densmore at gmail.com>
wrote:

> IIRC very badly as was MacOS was held back by...games of all things. But
> IIRC Adobe was quickly onto apples because picky people liked how it
> handled colours. That is compared to Windows 3.1 and 94(?) lol and yes Dad
> is a hero. LOL and yes I am biased.
> Pagemaker ? wowsa that's a name from the past! LOL.
> The reason why games didn't help Apples (then) uncertain future, as well
> was because kids (teens) was  who pestered John, Chade, Kyle, or Karen to
> get a new computer. Apple didn't  have that for a long time, not allowing
> clones up to a 2 year golden renaissance  years later also hurt them. BeOS
> at the time was more macos then macos.. So you had a glorified printer and
> webpage publisher that'd cost 5-7k+. Compare that to the PC world a 900$ pc
> was keeping pace with apple, steve jobs and his ego. That when Chad was
> done with homework, or kyle done writing a report. They might sign into a
> BBS to play bolo, or a MUD.
> Apple had to sell the UI and UX.
>
> Sufficed  to say Dad was up all night  (almost literally). cursing at
> "the yapping dogs" and yelling "***** ing hell steve[the steve jobs kind]
> what now!, oh would you like me to pull a rabbit out of my **** while I'm
> at it, we need to give it a ipadress so it's adressable by postscript!" .
> But him, Steve Caserous eta all did it! and now the now speech isfamous
> speech.  And Dad doesn't think he's a good programmer still. lol. Eh well
> not all heroes were capes, He's a Hero IMO.
> Get him to tell you about the time he proved you as long as a device has
> some sense of network addressing, you can get it to do almost anything,
> including drive monitors.  Or when him and Ben Stalts pranked SkunkWorks
> Sun with upside down displays using nothing more than NeWS's postscript,
> scripting code.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 4:54 PM Stephen Guerin <
> stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 11:30 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>
>>> My copy of Glenn Reid's 1990 Thinking in PostScript
>>> <https://w3-o.cs.hm.edu/users/ruckert/public_html/compiler/ThinkingInPostScript.pdf>
>>> sat on my shelf for two decades singing a siren song that wasn't ever quite
>>> strong enough for me to give it my full attention for the few weeks/months
>>> I believe it deserved.
>>>
>>> Someday (if humanity survives another century, or interstellar visitors
>>> bother to crack our rusty harddrives) this will all be as much fun as the
>>> vestigal (aka "junk") DNA we started finding when we started ubiquitous
>>> DNA/RNA sequencing.  It must all be "good for something"? Right?  Clearly
>>> was at one time!
>>>
>>> Fascinating that anyone (besides me) is even discussing such things 30
>>> years later:  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946
>>>
>>
>> 40 years earlier: From the same site, here's the first public demo of the
>> Mac in Boston in 1984. with Steve Jobs and the full Mac team onstage. I
>> think Owen is the hero of the group, though I'm biased :-)
>>
>>    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116
>>
>>
>> From that site:
>> He called out Owen Densmore for writing the printing routines at 10m45s:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqQJ-VnJ2uc&t=10m45s
>>
>> And Owen answered a question about printing at 15m:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqQJ-VnJ2uc&t=15m
>>
>> Owen is a brilliant programmer and "User Interface Flower Child", who led
>> the "Print Shop" group at Apple that created the printing architecture for
>> Apple's Lisa and Macintosh hardware, working closely with John Warnock and
>> other Adobe engineers on the LaserWriter.
>>
>>
>> Check out Steve Job's MIT Sloan Business school when he was at NEXT
>> referencing the importance of Owen's work that became desktop publishing on
>> Apple which was the Trojan Horse that launched Apple into mainstream
>> corporate:
>>
>>
>> https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-talks-leaving-apple-lessons-in-management-1992-mit-lecture-video-2018-5
>>
>> On the Macintosh's killer app and how he didn't see it coming (10:30):
>> "We never anticipated desktop publishing when we created the Mac. Sounds
>> funny because that turned out to be the Mac's compelling advantage, the
>> thing it did, not 1.5 or 2 times better than everything else, but 4, 5
>> times better than anything else, where you had to had one."
>>
>>
>> "We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers but we never thought
>> about Pagemaker, that whole industry really coming down on the desktop.
>> Maybe we weren't smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it happen
>> 9-12 months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business
>> strategy to focus on desktop publishing, and it became the Trojan Horse
>> that finally got the Mac into corporate America.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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