... from concept 2 product

Click the artwork if you'd like to download it for printing.

I'm impressed by the author or editor of the piece mentioned in my initial blog post. Within minutes of posting my comment, they had corrected the article. It ran in (at least) the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times. Good journalism!

Before reading this first new blog post, take a quick look at a very interesting article from today’s L.A. Times, Apple's third founder refuses to submit to regrets. It’s worth a read! http://bit.ly/afbIZm

Apple Invents Word Processing?

The article’s author, however, makes one revisionist historical observation that, "There was no such thing as a word processor yet. They were about to invent it." I'm pretty certain the Steves and Ron would smile and confirm that word processing was well on its way by the time Apple joined the scene.

My First Blog Post

I was in the midst of thinking through a good first blog post and the statement that “there was no such thing as a word processor yet” really got me reminiscing. It’s a bit long, but a review of the ancient history of office automation may help to clarify the matter a bit for those curious about how these technologies actually did emerge.

Punched Cards for Word Processing?

So way back in the 1950's, long before my time, a punched card system by M. Schultz Co. was used for word processing. Punched cards were then followed by punched tape systems. Seems old and funky now, but just think of these technologies as a flash memory substitute. Punched cards, like player piano rolls, were a time-appropriate way to store and manipulate words and data.

Coining a Term Marks Commercializaton of an Industry

In the 60’s, IBM coined the term "word processing" when they released the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter. Lexitron, the first CRT-based word processor, came out in the early 70's. In '74, Harold Koplow at Wang Labs wrote a program to drive the IBM Selectric from a cassette tape. Digital Equipment Corporation improved upon these devices in the mid 70's with the popular WPS-8 (WPS=Word Processing System), developed on their PDP-8 computer.

Apple Partnership in April ’76 and Incorporation In Jan ‘77

This is right about the time that Apple Computer incorporated and began work on the Apple I computer.

Some Products are Wonderful – the Second Time Around

The Apple I, designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak, came out in ’76. It was a short-lived product (16 months), but provided Steve Wozniak with the necessary experience to move ahead. Wozniak quickly followed with the Apple II and it was a huge commercial success. Many products take this route. There is a good concept, but for some reason, either the implementation fails, it's not what the market needs, or the market doesn't get the message about it. It’s those who believe in their product and who charge ahead with market-shaped features that usually succeed. Did you know that Cracker Jacks first came out without a prize in the box? When they decided to add the prize is when the numbers skyrocketed. Sometimes a missing feature or two can keep a good product from becoming great.

Apple II Word Processing Applications

At that time, the popular MicroPro International’s WordStar program had already been running on the CP/M OS. When CP/M was implemented on the Apple II (or as they used to write, the Apple ][), people started using WordStar on their Apples. Apple Writer 1.0 was released in 1979 for the Apple II, but displayed only 40 columns of text – and in ALL CAPS. It was created for Apple by Paul Lutus, a NASA engineer at the time.

Influence of Xerox PARC

Meanwhile, during the 70's, Xerox PARC had been making a ton of remarkable advances with word processing -- the GUI, bitmap displays, mouse, fonts, Ethernet, laser printing -- and in 1981 finally released a commercial WYSIWYG software program called the Xerox 8010 Information System, running the "Star" word processing application. These formative technologies would soon reshape word processing into "desktop publishing" and would influence the user experience on most every subsequent computer to date.

Gold in Them Thar Hills

Apple was able to visualize gold in the hills of Palo Alto and arranged a nice exchange with PARC. They would trade pre-IPO Apple stock if their engineers could get access to the PARC inventions. It was then that Apple, bootstrapped with ideas from Xerox, developed the Apple Lisa and the Apple Mac, along with a very well-designed word-processing application, MacWrite. Both the Lisa and the Mac, although designed by two distinct groups, were almost entirely based upon the Xerox work -- a very smart move on Apple’s part, indeed. The Lisa was actually more functional than the Mac, however being so complex it overtaxed the processor and ran slowly. It was great at first glance, but quickly became irritating to use. The Mac had less functionality. But it had an industrially-designed case – and it included sound! Apple had succeeded in commercializing the work that Xerox chose not to commercialize -- or protect, for that matter.

My Boeing Association (Sans the Gold)

I was fortunate to partner first with Xerox PARC and then with Apple Computer, as an office automation manager at Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in Seattle. Boeing tested and implemented many of the PARC inventions – including the Star, Ethernet, mouse, bitmapped graphics and InterPress. They also evaluated the Lisa and Mac products from Apple.

There was intense interest in beta products coming out of PARC. I started a Xerox User Group that suddenly had over 100 members. At the time, Boeing was printing enormous amounts of technical manuals for every system on every airplane sold. I collaborated with John Warnock and Chuck Geschke at PARC, who had built the page-description language (PDL) InterPress. It was important that they would understand Boeing’s business and user requirements.

InterPress Leads to PostScript

InterPress was PARC’s resolution-independent PDL used for their high-speed/high-volume printing. I was thrilled with the innovations coming from John and Chuck and asked them both to speak to the other interested folks at Boeing, which they gladly did on a number of occassions. When John and Chuck left PARC, I joined their new venture – a thrill of a lifetime for me. One of my first jobs was to evangelize their new product, Adobe PostScript, to many different industries. This was a product I could really get behind and my enthusiasm for it was obvious.

PostScript

PostScript is an Adobe reimplementation by Warnock and Geschke of Xerox InterPress (with Xerox' blessings). Its concepts and components form the basis for many of today’s graphics applications and systems. PostScript added color to laser printing and could easily be made to run on devices of different types (lasers, photo typesetters) and resolutions (72 dpi, 2540 dpi, or even a direct-to-copper-cylinder-gravure system custom created by one large publisher). John and Chuck, two of the most thoughtful and genuine people with whom I’ve worked, were among many others who also formed technology companies from the concepts first developed at PARC.

Space Station Project – What to Do?

Before packing up for Adobe, one of my final projects at Boeing was to spec out the office automation system to be used on the NASA Space Station. It needed to accommodate text inputs from many different sources. At the time, the best we could do was to write converters from each and every source format – and there were many. Another approach and option was to use plain text and format it with tags to indicate formatting.

Frankly, I was doubtful that the idea of using tags to mark up a document could stick. I didn’t have the vision of this tagging system working with the WYSIWYG systems, as they do today. Sitting next to me at the standards table were some committee members, a lot smarter than me who did. This vision was introduced at IBM in the '60s in a spec called GML, written by Charles Goldfarb. – Working together on an ISO committee, we advanced a standard based upon the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Incidentally, Goldfarb used his surname initials and those of his co-authors at IBM, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie, to name GML. SGML took a path of its own and remains the governing format for the approach used on the web, with its major subsets HTML and XML. SGML was a huge spec, difficult for a human to learn. HTML and XML, the two most popular "document type definitions" of SGML, are suitably narrow in scope for browsers, news readers and other specialized applications to successfully use this spec for WYSIWYG uses.

A Possible Solution

After joining Adobe in ‘86, I spoke to John about my challenges with both of these approaches to text management – either converting between WYSIWYG file formats or tagging plain text using a standardized language. I drew out a chart on John’s whiteboard of all of the formats with which I had been working and suggested that we simply needed a better way. We needed some type of intermediate format to which any word-processing system could write, whether it was WYSIWYG or tagged – so that both systems and people could quickly get the value of the communication.

Juggling Text and Graphics with Acrobat

John was fast to act and started a project, code-named Juggler, focused on exploring this idea of an intermediary format. He based it on the PostScript language. It took until ’93 for a commercial product, Adobe Acrobat, to emerge – but Adobe’s huge time investment was well worth the trouble for the company. After 17 years, Acrobat and its PDF format remain the gold standard for electronically published text and media. (Ahhh, so that’s what became of the gold from the Palo Alto hills.)