[fortran77]

I worked at Adobe in the early days; my first job was embedding PostScript into various manufacturer's printers.

I love the PostScript language and still play with the PostScript interpreter every now and then. Often if I need to plot something, it's fun to try to write the code in raw PostScript.

It's a shame "nobody" cares about printing anymore. In the late 80s as soon as I was able to afford a 300 dpi laser printer, I ran down to the store and plunked down $2500 or so for an HP LaserWriter. I used it with TeX (this was before Adobe) and thought I was witnessing a revolution! A real, powerful, printing press in my home! I'm old enough to have leaned how to set letterpress type in high school shop class....

[pstuart]

> thought I was witnessing a revolution!

You were. They were heady times indeed. My girlfriend at the time was a typesetter and did a lot of freelance using Ventura Publisher (on a 286 w/ 4MB!)

Quark XPress, Pagemaker, FrameMaker, Ventura... ahh the good old days ;-).

[Finnucane]

I still hold a grudge against Adobe for killing FrameMaker for the Mac.

[drfuchs]

It was hard to understand from the inside, too. The programming staff for the Mac port of FrameMaker was two guys, plus their manager who also contributed code. To be fair, it also needed separate testing, slightly modified manuals, box, and media, but still…

[fortran77]

Oh! Those Frame people! I was there during the acquisition. Steve Kirsch got a great deal. Adobe, not so much.

Adobe bought another company called "Frame" recently: frame.io

[drfuchs]

I was there, too, from a few months after the founding of Frame, to a year after the acquisition by Adobe nine years later. From the Frame side, it seemed like Adobe figured they were doing a kind of mix of an acqui-hire and putting a place-holder on the FrameMaker customer base, with the notion that in short order they'd be able to move them all over to InDesign by just adding a couple of features (kind of like they managed to do with the PageMaker acquisition).

But in the meetings between the engineering teams, we Frame folks couldn't understand how InDesign's planned extensibility scheme could possibly provide for our feature set; while the InDesign folks didn't seem to grasp what we were even talking about, having never dealt with the kind of features our sorts of customer required (which was understandable, given that they were in nose-to-the-grindstone mode for getting their stuff out the door in the much delayed, and wildly more pressing, effort to compete with Quark Express).

Thus, it wasn't surprising that when Adobe management gave a heads-up to some Fortune-500 (and US Government) customers that they'd be canceling the whole Frame product in deference to InDesign, they were met with some powerful push-back. After all, you can't do the bookshelf-sized technical documentation set for a Boing 767 in a product designed to handle advertising brochures and NYT best-sellers. Bowing to customer pressure, Adobe petulantly reversed their decision, and off-shored development. Indeed, the FrameMaker product lives on until today, and as far as I'm aware, InDesign still doesn't supersede it, even a few decades later (not that it particularly ought to).

So, given that Frame Technology was a public company listed on the NASDAQ, and that Adobe bought it for a modest premium over the going market price, and that the price-to-sales ratio was an unremarkable 5 or so, what's your perspective on how Adobe didn't get a reasonable deal? Seems to me that they just failed to understand the new customer base that they hadn't previously served, and subsequently botched it.

[throw0101a]

> FrameMaker for the Mac.

Especially with the subsequent 'renaissance' of the Mac in recent years.

[contingencies]

Upload to print shop via ZMODEM...

[trop]

My high school had a computer lab with a networked LaserWriter (this might have been 1987). It outclassed any screen in the room, so far as display resolution. And with its 68000 processor and PostScript interpreter, it was the fastest and most capable graphics machine I'd ever seen. Indeed, a 300dpi laser printer driven by PostScript was a wonder.

I ordered the Addison Wesley documentation. I figured out that sending a text file to the printer which started with "%!PS" would make the rest be processed as PostScript. Suddenly I could code vector graphics programs and send them to the LaserWriter and get beautiful prints. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and my memory is that there were some great ideas for graphics in that.

The good news: I got a chance to program in a well thought-out interpreted language (a wonder, coming from the world of BASIC, Fortran, C or even Pascal). I got to produce wonderful and intricate graphics output. Reading the IEEE article makes me grateful that the Adobe designers "put functionality over speed".

The bad news: The most interesting output could still take minutes (or more) to run. Of course, this was confusing (or annoying) if someone else in the lab wanted, say, to print their term paper then run off to class. I'd like to think that I learned to run my print jobs at odd hours, and in the worst case, to power cycle the printer and lose my print, to make the device available to the room.

[fallat]

I have to ask: did you truly print some beautiful typeset piece?

I don't get what you mean: most people I know, when they print something, expect it to be of some quality. Sure maybe the typesetting isn't great, but the actual ppi (I think that's the term), they definitely care for.

I would say you did witness a revolution! But let's remember what came before it, and for most consumers, even the earliest technologies "did the job". Anything beyond "does the job" is gravy, and will likely not be recognized unless you begin to commercialize your work, where people expect beyond "did the job".

[klodolph]

I'd have to disagree with "anything beyond 'does the job' is gravy", because people use these printers for different jobs and some people definitely do care about the quality. Good quality printing is easier to read; the images and diagrams are clearer and easier to understand; etc.

I remember using dot matrix printers. The ink looks faded and uneven, there are often patches of missing ink. Consumer dot matrix printers from the 1980s and 1990s mostly just plain suck, and we knew it.

Laser printers really were a big part of the desktop publishing revolution. We take it for granted today, but that's because the revolution is over, desktop publishing won, and manual typesetting / layout is now extremely niche.