On Nov 26, 2009, at 2:23 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
Cool, do you remember the time with Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson
and Steve Jobs?
Yup. Interesting history. Jobs goes to PARC and is blown away.
Starts the Lisa project (precursor to Mac). Lots of Xerox folks went
to Apple, me included (I was at WARC .. the Webster NY research center
focusing on printer code). Larry Tessler found about my printing work
and invited me for an interview.
I had been bringing the Alto, Xerox's first personal computer,
technology to Webster, even building a hardware lab so that we could
add additional S-Registers to the micro-code system, thus multi-task
printers: receiving networked documents and printing them.
My first talk at Apple was why they could not solve the WYSIWYG
problem especially with non-rational aspect ratios (i.e. h/w of
printer not multiples of the screen). We had proven the problem to be
"hard". But heuristics were fairly acceptable. But still
computationally intense.
Brought along a couple of engineers with me, most famous being Steve
Capps the hero of the Newton.
Recently I read one of the biographies about Steve Jobs ("Icon" from
Jeffrey Young and William L. Simon). Both Hertzfeld and Atkinson are
mentioned in the book, but no word of Owen Densmore.
I was one of the less well known guys 'cause I came over from the Lisa
project to do the printing. I asked Andy and Bill what their approach
to printing was going to be and it was to do screen dumps! Bad idea!
We re-engineered QuickDraw so that there were "hooks" for all the
graphics calls, and so printing could just give the application a
large "window" that was the same size as a piece of paper. It was
simple enough that the Mac "pirate" crew liked it.
And Steve wanted a laser printer so this architecture worked really
well. I ended up leading the PrintShop team that worked with Adobe.
We built a PostScript interpreter of QuickDraw which we hooked up to
the hooks above. Bloody hard.
They must have missed something... Have you been the "freshman in
the team" responsible for import/export functions, language
translations and printing programs?
Printing, fonts, and a simple multi-processing stunt that let
Microsoft print and use their applications at the same time. My name
is inside the first casting of the Mac case which had the names of the
other engineers. Around 12 of us, as I recall.
To me, the two heros of the Mac were Bruce Horn (Resource forks and
much much more) and Larry Kenyon, the OS guy. Both were under extreme
pressure and had absurd conflicts with engineering management.
Interesting how we all left within a year of the release of the Mac.
The "carpet baggers" (outside managers with absolutely no
understanding of the Mac and computing) came and made Apple absolutely
hell.
I spent 2 hours once with Jobs talking about building the "Big Mac",
using Unix, PostScript, and TCP/IP networking. He listened. But also
left, but then the NeXT machine was a lot like what I wanted.
-- Owen
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