[acg]

Reminds me of the Stanford address where Jobs claims that computers may not have had typography if he'd not done a calligraphy course. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc I'm sure the Parc guys that founded Adobe would beg to differ.

[rimantas]

  I'm sure the Parc guys that founded Adobe would beg to
  differ.

Maybe, but I am not sure how much. I'd say Apple played a major role in Adobe becoming Adobe. It was Jobs who persuaded them to change initial plan to build the whole package: computer + printer, and focus on software which Apple needed for LaserWriter.

  "Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure
  we had the resources to stay in business, and Apple
  also bought a little less than 20 percent of the
  company, which quintupled the value of the original
  investors' money. Steve wanted to make sure that we
  finish this product, because it was critical for him
  to have the LaserWriter"

  "Fortunately, there was a young marketing guy at Apple
  named John Scull, who aware of what was going on (as
  were we) at Aldus up in Seattle, because PageMaker come
  out at the same time as the LaserWriter did. He came up
  with the idea of getting the three companies—Apple, Aldus
  and Adobe—together to put together a marketing campaign called
  "desktop publishing".

Source: Interview with Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems in "Founders at work".

[shalmanese]

Wow, imagine if Jobs had taken a microbiology course. Apple computers would be able to cure cancer by now.

[papersmith]

[TeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) was released in 1978, though I'm not sure as to the time line of the other developments.