[FRIAM] 0 years ago today - Our Owen Densmore as a leading star on stage with Jobs unveiling the first Macintosh
Gillian Densmore
gil.densmore at gmail.com
Tue Jan 30 16:42:43 EST 2024
Jobs and Dad (Owen) had some differences (being polite). Was one of the
reasons he went to SUN, IIRC it also had a infamously unhealthy work/life
balance. The mac team also was cutting it very close to get a working(ish)
computer for steve jobs to show off. The mac team had some 'unexpected
features' (bugs) at least on the software level, and IIRC hardware side as
well before it could be shipped. I always thought it sounded a little like
steve hawkings.
On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 1:54 PM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
wrote:
> The 1984 Macintosh Ad
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsjMmAqmblQ&ab_channel=BloombergOriginals>
> 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 discussions
>
> - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=1336 – Jobs explaining
> the printer
> - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=1741 - Owen
> introduction
> - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=2379 - Randy Wigginton
> nods to Owen’s printer work
> - https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?feature=shared&t=2683 - Printing
> question answered by Jobs and Owen
> - https://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 abilities
>
> Owen left Apple to join Sun in the last half of the 80s and worked on NeWS
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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
> <https://infinite.mit.edu/video/steve-jobs-next-computer-corp-sloan-distinguished-speaker-series> ~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.edu
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