bittermelon

In 1980 John Warnock and Charles Geschke created a way to send files from a computer to a printer. They formed a company to market their system.

Name this company (without the help from Google. And if you don't know the name of this company, you should turn in your photographer's badge now.)


Geschke died today at 81. RIP.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I didn't use Google, I used Wikipedia, does that count?

newsguygeorge Loc: Victoria, Texas

Adobe

Cwilson341 Loc: Central Florida

I have an unfair advantage. I saw an article about him today.

newsguygeorge Loc: Victoria, Texas

That's how I knew the answer.

Cwilson341 Loc: Central Florida

😊

User ID

With no hint except “turn in your photographer badge” it was very obviously adobe.

The real puzzle is “how did they use the files when they could not yet print them ?” Seems like they would hafta read them on a crt ?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Adobe was founded in 1982, and there were laser printers well before then. After Postscript was released there were postscript printers to specifically use the format, but where most people encountered Adobe for the first time were adobe fonts (before Truetype fonts were introduced). When I was at Tektronix, we were producing high end color graphic printers in the early-mid 80s.

Wallen Loc: Middle Earth

From what i understand is that previous printers print using a bitmap file or converting into a bitmap then printing. Adobe created a software that digitally describes the page instead. Sort of comparing a photo/screen capture of a webpage to an actual HTML coding of a page. One is not editable and rigid, the other one can conform to different sizes of monitors.

rmorrison1116 Loc: Near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

I too recently saw a video that featured the Adobe founders. There's actually interesting stuff on You Tube if you wade through a lot of the less interesting stuff.

ELNikkor

Glad I don't have a badge to turn in...

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

And I am still paying for it every day! Does that count?

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Adobe Systems.

Teaming up with Apple to build the world’s first PostScript printer, and buying Aldus to get PageMaker, were brilliant moves. Buying the Knoll brothers’ creation that became Photoshop was another.

bobbyjohn Loc: Dallas, TX

Bittermelon, in a similar vein, dating back to 1900, what company did these CEO's lead?

Hint: the company name got changed somewhere between then and now. What was the original and the present name of this company? Bonus points if you can actually put names with the faces!

(Download)

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yes, there were raster graphics printers before PostScript. What PostScript did was to revolutionize the printing industry, by creating a page description language that could combine raster graphics, vector graphics, and vector-scalable fonts. Aldus took one look at it, Adobe fonts, and the Mac, and saw the opportunity to build a page layout tool. That became PageMaker.

Meanwhile, Linotype Hell, Compugraphics, and others built PostScript imagesetters that could do with a laser what used to take about ten steps to do manually, and photographically, in traditional offset printing companies.

I followed all this as a user and systems implementer in the yearbook and school portrait industry. We put a lot of early desktop publishing tools in our companies. We had HUGE respect for Adobe, at the same time they annoyed the crap out of us.

Canon, HP, Tektronix, and many others had their own page description languages for office laser printers, but suddenly found that they needed to license PostScript or a near-exact clone of it to compete.

PageMaker and its key competitor, QuarkXPress, took over the pre-press world and the "desktop publishing" revolution was underway in the mid-to-late 1980s. Adobe developed the PDF file format to move PostScript pages from pre-press people to printing houses. Later, the format would became ubiquitous for replacing direct mail marketing and reference documents with online downloads. My wife works in marketing. Her company replaced a warehouse full of literature with a web server stocked with PDFs of the same literature! Bits beat atoms...

PostScript clone makers soon popped up like weeds. Some clones were awful, but others would do *almost* everything PostScript could do. In 1990, I put a massive 92 page per minute Kodak LED printer in our photo lab, to make millions of portrait package quality guarantee inserts each month in the fall. It was a PostScript clone, so we had to avoid certain characters. Later, we swapped it for a pair of 45 PPM Océ printers that used a different engine capable of personalizing PostScript documents from our mainframe data. They were all driven by Adobe PageMaker running on a few Macs.

I put a Tektronix wax thermal PostScript printer in our marketing department for quick proofing uses. The IT guy got mad when I figured out it ran three times faster via TCP/IP than it did on our standard Novell Netware network print server, and without slowing down the rest of the network. (God, I hated Novell! What a scam... I'm so glad the rest of the IT universe figured that out.)

I put a Linotype Hell film imagesetter in the lab to make title overlays for group pictures on line film. Later, I set up a system of Canon color copiers driven with Fiery PostScript raster image processors from images on our Kodak DP2 lab software servers and personalized data merged by a third party app, Planet Press. They made all of our portrait proofs.

We had 12 PCs running Photoshop for portrait retouching (and for spotting scans of film images in the early 2000s). In 1999, we had 30 Macs doing pre-press prep in PageMaker, driven from a MS FoxPro database, putting together memory book (elementary school yearbook) portrait panel pages. Output was to a Compugraphic film imagesetter at our printing plant.

None of that would have been possible without PostScript and Adobe software. May Mr. Geschke rest in peace and not be forgotten for his leadership and contributions.