laser-lovers@uw-beaver (02/09/85)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA> The Sunday, February 3rd San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle has an article on the front page of the business section entitled "Startup company's big break." Adorned by a picture of John Warnock and Charles Geschke, the article discusses Adobe and PostScript. The tone of the article, written by C.W. Miranker, Examiner business writer, is very favorable towards Adobe. Much of the information in the article has already appeared in Laser-Lovers. (About the only new piece of market-related information is the comment that "Microsoft already has jumped on the [PostScript] bandwagon.") I found the comments on the company, itself, more interesting and reproduce some of them below (trivia time for laser printer fans). --Rick ... The Palo Alto company broke out the champagne the night before the $7,000 LaserWriter was unveiled at Apple's annual meeting. All 27 employees showed up for the event, turning Jan. 23 into a day of corporate celebration. "It was a two-year baby that finally got born," said marketing manager Rob Auster. ... None of the PostScript-equipped products has begun volume shipments, but Adobe has supported itself with $2.5 million in backing from the Hambrecht & Quist investment banking firm plus advances on the royalties it will get for every product incorporating its software. In the year ending Nov. 30, those advances amounted to $2.5 million and gave the private company a small profit, $50,000. In December, Apple acquired a small stake in the company. PostScript's roots go back nearly a decade. [John] Warnock [company founder, president and inventor of PostScript] first wrote the software while at Evans & Sutherland, a Utah company that makes flight-simulation graphics equipment. It later migrated with him to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, where it found a very different use in a graphics and printing lab run by Charles Geschke. Warnock used it to enable Xerox customers to work with a page on a work station and then transmit it to any of several printers. But the product never made it outside Xerox until last year. And by then, Warnock and Geschke had departed in frustration. "Both of us found that working for a large company (made it)...very hard to bring products to market," said Geschke, now Adobe's executive vice president. ... "It was a really gutsy thing to start a company to create a language and try to make it a standard," said Jonathan Seybold, editor in chief of the Seybold Report on Publishing Systems. "It could very easily have failed...but Apple gave them the impetus to get off the ground. "They're beginning to get enough momentum behind them and are certainly a prime candidate for a standard.... They have a good chance of making it now." He noted, however, that PostScript would not be the only standard, because IBM is the dominant computer company and likely is hatching its own printing strategy. But because IBM PCs can output to the LaserWriter, he expects PostScript to gain some acceptance in IBM-using offices. ... Printing systems capable of [the quality provided by PostScript printers] typically cost upwards of $75,000. The $7,000 LaserWriter, though it might seem expensive for the personal computer market, is actually the most inexpensive means of producing high-quality text and graphics from microcomputers, according to Seybold. Naturally, Adobe uses PostScript and the LaserWriter for its own paperwork. "It's a credo of our company," Geschke said. That goes for the 190-page programming manual for PostScript, a journal illustrating its printing capabilities, the company backgrounder and news releases, Adobe's business cards were "mastered" on a laser printer using PostScript software, enabling the company to sidestep the time-consuming back-and-forth with a print shop by supplying camera-ready art. And the giant brass Adobe logo gracing the company lobby was mastered in much the same way, except that the laser printout had to be pasted together because the letters were far bigger than individual sheets of paper. What does the name Adobe have to do with the company's business? Not a thing. "We didn't want anything with X's or V's in it," Warnock said. We wanted a nice California name.... There's also a creek behind my house called Adobe," he added with a laugh. -------