[FRIAM] 0 years ago today - Our Owen Densmore as a leading star on stage with Jobs unveiling the first Macintosh

[Jochen Fromm]

Wow, the young Steve Jobs and Owen on the same stage, together with Andrew Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. I didn't know he knew all of them. Has he got Apple shares as compensation back then? Apple shares from 1984 must be worth a fortune now.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> Date: 1/30/24  9:55 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>, "Wedtech at Redfish. Com" <wedtech at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] 0 years ago today - Our Owen Densmore as a leading star on stage with Jobs unveiling the first Macintosh The 1984 Macintosh Ad shown during the Jan 22 Superbowl teased the Jan 26, 1984 introduction of the Mac at the  Apple Shareholders meeting (I don't have the video). 

Jobs did a demo and then a panel discussion with 8 members of the software and hardware team  The whole presentation including the developer panel was repeated 4 days later at a Boston Computer Society meeting. Our Owen Densmore is one of those 8 as the software engineer lured from Xerox to work on WYSIWIG printing and embedding a software rendering engine in the printer itself. here's the time codes of these discussionshttps://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=1336 – Jobs explaining the printerhttps://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=1741 - Owen introductionhttps://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=2379 - Randy Wigginton nods to Owen’s printer workhttps://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=2683 - Printing question answered by Jobs and Owenhttps://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=3352 - Owen gets up to get a floppy disk :]https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=3744 - Owen comments on the Mac’s multi-tasking abilitiesOwen left Apple to join Sun in the last half of the 80s and worked on NeWS - postscipt-based windowing system.  NeXT would later adopt instead of QuickDraw for its windowing system.When Jobs was at NeXT, he gave this talk at MIT Sloan School ~8 years later. In the talk, I find his observations interesting esp wrt to how important printing and desktop publishing would be for the Mac and they didn't predict it. When we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing when we created the Mac. Sounds funny, because that turned out to be the Mac's compelling advantage, right? The thing that it did not one and a half or two times better than everything else, but four or five times better than anything else, where you had to have one. We never anticipated it. We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers, but we never thought about pagemaker, that whole industry really coming down to the desktop. Maybe we weren't smart enough.But we were smart enough to see it start to happen nine to 12 months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing, and it became the Trojan horse that eventually got the Mac into corporate America, where it could show its owners all the other wonderful things it could do.Apple has Owen to thank for that!Redfish, btw, was an Apple VAR in the early 90s helping commercial printers to prepress - digital scanning, digital halftoning, color separation, digital imaging (early photoshop), plate-ready film printing, and page layout (QuarkXpress and PageMaker). Of course, I didn't know Owen yet - I would first meet him at the 2000 Complex Systems Summer School where we were both students from the BusNet. I was from BiosGroup and Owen from Sun R&D Labs.Mad respect for your changing the world, Owen! And you ain't done yet. :-)-Stephen_____________________________________________________________________________________________________stephen.guerin at simtable.com stephenguerin at fas.harvard.eduHarvard Visualization Research and Teaching Labmobile: (505)577-5828
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