Bill Gates was absolutely destroyed, on so many levels, in an AMA, today.
(media.patriots.win)
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Postscript wasn’t much of an invention though since it’s essentially just FORTH. The big idea was to use an actual Turing complete language for page description. But it was a bit much for the first laser printers. I mean I can see why xerox might have ditched that idea for printers due to the hardware resource requirements.
Xerox was warring among themselves, from all accounts, including my dad's persecutive working with them. One side of the executive suite wanted to expand into a tech company and do more than copiers, the other half were the "The owner wanted copiers, and that's all we do" side.
Granted, there's no guarantee Postcript would have emerged if Xerox had developed it. It's the same thing as when Wozniak was told by Hewlett Packard to go ahead and make the Apple 1, when they could have owned it.
Lots of blunders of that magnitude were made in that era, few had the vision of where it was all headed.
Yea, even if they had decided to expand their products they could have picked the wrong things to develop. It seems like desktop publishing stuff of some sort should have been a no brainer though. I mean the copiers are to publish stuff in more limited runs than is cost effective for offset printing. Now these days fancy laser printer/copiers have essentially replaced small offset presses. Even if the quality isn’t quite as good it’s close enough. Heck, now they even have high speed ink jet printers replacing larger offset presses for some stuff.
The irony is that Xerox licensed Postscript back from Adobe for their laserwriters, and they made the guts of the color laser printer guts that Apple sold - so the market was there, eventually. They entered the printer market eventually, after the DTP revolution got underway with the Mac, their cheap laser printer, and Pagemaker.
But yeah. Xerox supporting the entire publishing industry the way Adobe did - wasn't gonna happen. Postscript raised the tide for a lot of industries, like fonts, DTP, pro press, etc.