The Dawn of Desktop Publishing - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

we left the story last time celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh the thing that used to enrage Steve Jobs it's wonderful Steve it's cute but it's a bit of a toy what is it for and here's the answer it was the Apple laser writer I should apologize right at the outset we tried everything we knew to get hold of an original Apple laser writer one but we just couldn't this one is a fairly early Apple laser riter 2 uh this one is dated 1988 there's one behind me that we might got off eBay we might refer to that one a little bit later on the one behind me is even earlier it's 1987 as opposed to 1985 but we did the best we could Steve Jobs had the foresight to invest very heavily in this other technology that came out of Xerox Park John waro Chuck gki founding Adobe and having this new two-dimensional Graphics language that was also suitable for being a page description language for Laser Printers and types Setters it was called postcript jobs invested very heavily in this he bought Adobe stock and I think John waro told me he gave them a million and a half dollars in upfront royalties because again jobs is farsighted and he got it right he thought that the combination of the Mac with the laser writer would be just magic they couldn't get it to Market in time for the launch of the Mac in 84 it had to wait a whole year so we're talking early 1985 despite locating these two Laser Printers the thing that causes problems with these things when they get as old as these are is the power supply it's not that the power supply doesn't work it does but the one part of a laser printer cycle which is really demanding is not so much running the logic inside it to types set the page page it's the fact that when you roll out the page you have to in the end fuse the toner ink with heat onto the paper to make it stick permanently and to cut a long story short the power supplies on this one and on the one behind me and I was so tired they just soak furiously if they're asked to give up seven amps just like that but I will turn it on and hopefully Sean might be able to zoom in show you what happens the green lights flash as it's booting up you end up full of Hope the green light on the left will start blinking it's just checking that all of its logic board here is quite happy postcript and front's been checked but oh dear it's blinking red and we've tried everything we know so sorry we can't actually run the thing for you however when it was working and wasn't sulking this is your bootp sheet and it is just a playful thing done with proper fonts and full computer Graphics you can probably see at the top that there's a capital P it told you that it's postcript there is much use down here of sanser font and those of you who know about these things will say yes it is helvetica reporting even that there is rs232 a Serial line rs422 now that's an adaptation of the iso standard that in the Apple domain was called Apple talk it's a medium Speed network it's better than serial line Apple talk could do 230 kilobits 230 kilobits is okay but it's not ethernet early ethernet is 10 megabits way faster again so it' got a network of sorts but not a very high-speed one it's telling you how many fonts there are inside it it's got 35 built-in fonts the laser rer one only had 30 and then down at the bottom it's telling you that this particular one is equipped with 2 megabytes of ram now that was a lot in those days and it wasn't there to support a multitasking gameplay machine it was there simply and solely to support font rendering to the laser printed drum and the chip inside that laser riter as we'll see later on was of the 68,000 um family just like it is in the Macintosh but run at a much faster clock speed by the time it got to this laser printer over here it was faster still it was a 68020 and boy did you need it you really needed that to get it to work at all the problem with a laser printer is that if you've got your page all bit mapped and rendered and ready to go and you know an A4 or us letter size page you're talking about a megabyte you're talking eight megabits worth of black and white dots but once inside here you tell the drum to start Imaging stuff on the paper and you start rolling the paper out you are committed you can't say stop I want to do the bottom half a bit later I'm running out of out of compute power you can't do that when you got to go you got to go some of you have seen the previous videos on the 202 typ Setter can sort of draw the contrast here the 202 had the great advantage that it was all done in letter box strips the Imaging onto a reel of paper and if you after you've done one letter box full you wanted to go away and have a cup of tea before you did the rest well then you could there was no problem but not with this it's utterly page based when you roll you've got to roll you can't stop and it was a huge demand to be able to keep up with the roll out speed of this and believe me it was only just doable particular particularly with laser rouer one technology there were 13 fonts inside the earlier one when I say fonts you know what were the 13 have been four flavors of times Roman regular bold bold italic and italic four flavors of altica ordinary oblique so on four flavors of Kura the fixed pitch font bold bold oblique ordinary and so on and one mathematical symbols F font 34s are 12 + 1 is 1 and they're built in as we shall see Steve Jobs who'd done a graphics arts degree at Reed College I think in Oregon although he dropped out before he got his degree knew all about type faces their names all this kind of stuff and he said John John you know we got to save money can't we just go with with clone fonts you know things that look like times Roman or sanseri helvetica and John told me he said look Steve I hope I've got this the right way around you drink Coke don't you how do you feel Steve if I offer you a can of Pepsi and the look of horror on Jobs's face and John said I think I made my point Steve if we're going to position this as the serious future of type setting we've got to have proper fonts that people have heard of so we won the day and I think he was right it largely did help to convince the types setting community that this thing although it had problems at the beginning was on the road to revolutionizing type setting well I've taken out the logic board from the laser writer 2 that is behind me and this one is dated 1987 and it's a real eye opener it was really taking me back here on my left your right is the Ram 2 megabytes worth of it the laser rer one out one and a half but they fan up pretty quickly they ideally needed more this is solded onto the board all of these bits make up your 2 megabytes here here 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight eight ROMs and at the time that came out in the laser wrer one those eight ROMs constituting half a megabyte of firmware inside here was a world record no prizes for guessing that in here is The postcript Interpreter a minimal little operating system that could read stuff down the serial line or access extra forms from disc so there's a postcript interpreter is in here plus embedded at this stage the 35 fronts rather than the 13 well there's the CPU chip this one being the 1987 model is still a Motorola 68,0 16bit if we could look inside that one being a little bit younger and later it's moved on to being a 68020 at that stage over here is the much vaunted apple torque over at this side is the two possible sockets that gave you the option for a Serial line that would run a standard up to 9.6 kilobits but I think there was a switch setting here you could do to make it run at 19.2 obviously if you're doing serious work with this you use the Apple talk whenever you could Steve Jobs was very happy with it running over Apple talk preferably with just a room full of Macs all sharing the Apple talk but those of us who bought one of these things for 7,000 pounds were not really happy unless it could be used with other computers so there was a big growth industry shortly after this was released in linking ethernet networking to Apple talk with names like spiderbox to enable you to do that so yes it eventually became sharable you could justify the huge expenditure in buying the thing so here we are in early 1985 John waro and Steve Jobs rehearsing And discussing how they were going to present this winning combination what was going to be the demonstration document that really convinced people and made everybody say wow well don't forget Steve Jobs passionately wanted the Macintosh to be taken seriously as a business computer and between them I don't know whose idea it was they came up with this idea what more boring but more convincing document could you have than a tax form it's not the main us tax form it's one for lient income this thing rolling out of that laser printer John told me they timed it at 1 minute and 15 seconds to which the great legendary Steve J said John I can hold them I'm I'm good at holding people in my laser glare and making them concentrate but I cannot hold them for a minute and 15 seconds is there some way you could speed it up John realized that what he had to do given his knowledge of The postcript Interpreter inside here was effectively to do something that we in computer science Now call by various names unrolling the loops flattening the code making it be inline code for those of you that have ever had The Misfortune to blunder into opening up a PDF file accidentally in a text editor if you look very closely at this you will see it looks like the birth of PDF it isn't pure PDF but it's very similar so is this the birth of PDF yeah yes in 1985 having to do this gave John the idea that this was the way to unroll postcript to make it longer but faster and more predictable as to how many pages it will produce because the problem with postcript in its pure form is you often couldn't predict how many pages it would produce whereas in PDF as you know you can so here again was history in the making unrolling the loops flattening the code making it be inline code and what this broadly means is if you have this was absolutely groundbreaking it's completely new Computing paradigm