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 Laserwriter. I should apologize right at the outset.
We tried everything we knew to get ahold of an original Apple Laserwriter I,
but we just couldn't. This one is a fairly early Apple Laserwriter II.
This one is dated 1988...
There's one behind me that we 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 Parc.
John Warnock, Chuck Geschke, founding Adobe and having this new
two-dimensional graphics language that was also suitable for being a page description language,
for laser printers and typesetters, it was called Postscript.
Jobs invested very heavily in this. He bought Adobe stock,
and I think John Warnock 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 Laserwriter 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 typeset the 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 are now so tired,
they just sulk furiously if they're asked to give up seven amps just like that. But I will turn it on,
and hopefully shall now be able to zoom in and 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's all though. Its logic board here is quite happy, Postscript fonts begin [unintelligible]. 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 boot-up 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". They told you that it's Postscript.
There is much use down here, a Sans-Serif font, and those of you who know about these things will say yes, it is Helvetica.
Reporting even that there is
RS-232, a serial line,
RS-422. Now that's an adaptation of the ISO standard that, in the Apple domain, was called "Appletalk".
It's a medium speed network. It's better than serial line.
Appletalk could do 230 kilobits.
230 kilobits is okay, but it's not Ethernet.
Early Ethernet is 10 megabits, way faster again.
So you've 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 Laserwriter I only had 13, and they're down at the bottom.
It's telling you that this particular one is equipped with two megabytes of RAM. Now,
that was a lot in those days. And it wasn't
there to support a multitasking game-playing machine,
it was there simply and solely to support font rendering to the laser printer drum.
And the chip inside that Laserwriter, as we'll see later on,
was of the 68000 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. A problem with a laser printer
is that if you've got your page all bitmapped 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 8 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 Typesetter, can sort of draw the contrast here. The 202 had the great advantage that it was all done in
letterbox strips, the imaging onto a reel of paper.
And if you, after you turn one letterbox full, you wanted to go away
and have a cup of tea before you did the rest, well then, you could. There's 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,
particularly with Laserwriter I technology.
There were 13 fonts inside the earlier one. When I say fonts, you know, what would the 13 have been? Four flavours of Times Roman,
regular, bold, bold italic, and italic, four flavours of Helvetica,
ordinary, oblique, so on... four flavours of Courier, a fixed-pitch font,
bold, bold oblique, ordinary and so on, and one mathematical symbols font. Three 4s are 12, plus 1 is 13.
And they're built in, as we shall see. Steve Jobs, who had done a
graphics arts degree at Reed College, I think, in Oregon, although he dropped out before he got his degree,
knew all about
typefaces, their names, all this kind of stuff. And he said "John, John," you know, "We've got to save money.
Can't we just go with with clone fonts, you know, things that look like Times Roman
or San Serif, Helvetica?" And John Tommy 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' face... and John said, "I think I made my point, Steve.
If we're going to position this as the serious future of typesetting, we've got to have proper fonts that people have
heard of." So he won the day, and I think he was right.
He largely did help to convince the typesetting community that this thing,
although it had problems at the beginning, was on the road to
revolutionising typesetting. Well, I've taken out the logic board from the Laserwriter II
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,
two megabytes' worth of it. The Laserwriter I had one-and-a-half, but they found out pretty quickly
they ideally needed more. This is soldered onto the board. All of these bits make up your two megabytes here.
Here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight... Eight ROMs.
And, at the time that came out in the Laserwriter I, those eight ROMs,
constituting half a megabyte of firmware inside here, was a world record. No prizes for guessing
that in here is the Postscript interpreter, a minimal little
operating system that could read stuff down the serial line or access extra formats from disk.
So there's a Postscript interpreter is in here, plus
embedded at this stage, the 35 fonts, rather than the 13.
Well, there's a CPU chip. This one, being the 1987 model, is still a
Motorola 68000, 16-bit. If we 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 Appletalk.
Over at this side is the two possible sockets that gave you the option for 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 Appletalk whenever you could. Steve Jobs is very happy with it running over Appletalk,
preferably with just a roomful of Macs all sharing the Appletalk.
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 Appletalk, with names like "Spider Box" to enable you to do that.
So, yes, it eventually became shareable. You can justify the huge
expenditure in buying the thing. So here we are in early 1985,
John Warnock 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 supplementary income. This thing rolling out of that laser printer,
John told me they timed it at 1 minute and 15 seconds,
which the great legendary Steve Jay said, "John, I can hold them.
I'm good at holding people in my laser glare,
at 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 Postscript 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 in-line 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? Yes.
In 1985,
having to do this gave John the idea
that this was the way to unroll Postscript to make it longer,
but faster and more predictable as to how many pages it will produce. Because the problem with Postscript 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.