PostScript
In 1982, two researchers from Xerox PARC decided to walk out. John Warnock and Charles Geschke had just spent months developing a printing technology called Interpress, capable of describing a page to be printed without worrying about the type of printer used. The concept was innovative, but Xerox saw no commercial interest in it. The two men then founded Adobe Systems and got to work on their own version: PostScript.
The era was hardly conducive to this kind of venture. The 1970s were steeped in a purely computational conception of computing. IBM boasted in its advertisements about the derisory cost of multiplications on its machines. But at Xerox PARC, another idea was germinating: the computer would become a communication tool. Everyone would soon have their own personal machine, connected to printers shared over the network.
Adobe's initial plan was to manufacture printers and open printing service centers. Bill Hambrecht, their investor, persuaded them to change course. Why not instead design complete systems combining workstations and laser printers? That's when Steve Jobs burst onto the scene.
Jobs discovered PostScript and immediately grasped its potential. His Macintosh revolutionized the user interface, but printing was a disaster. The ImageWriter barely exceeded 72 dots per inch, a derisory resolution for serious use. In 1985, Apple released the LaserWriter, the first printer to embed PostScript. This machine contained more computing power than the Macintosh: 512 KB of read-only memory just for the PostScript code, a veritable fortune.
The announced price of $7,000 shocked Apple's sales staff. Three times the price of the Macintosh for a printer! Jobs held firm, and the opportune drop in memory chip prices ultimately vindicated his gamble.
PostScript solved a complex technical problem with a strikingly simple approach. The language treated text as a special case of graphics. This unification allowed characters to be manipulated with total freedom: they could be rotated, resized, and deformed at will. The idea was all the more appealing because it transcended the resolution of the output device. A page description could be printed on different types of printers while maintaining its quality.
Adobe didn't stop at creating a printing standard. In 1987, the company launched Illustrator, a vector drawing software. The era was bold because no graphic designer used computers. Illustrator's interface, based on Bézier curves and their control points, was born from a family anecdote. Warnock's wife, a professional graphic designer, regularly asked him to hand-code in PostScript the logos she had to create. This domestic experience directly inspired the software's interface.
The following year, Adobe acquired a small program developed by the Knoll brothers. This software would become Photoshop. The gamble seemed crazy: the largest hard drives didn't exceed 20 megabytes, just enough to store one high-resolution photo. Adobe was betting on hardware evolution, and history proved them right.
In 1989, PostScript's dominant position faltered. Apple and Microsoft joined forces to create TrueType, a competing format for fonts. Adobe responded by rapidly developing ATM (Adobe Type Manager) for displaying fonts on screen. The technical quality of the solution and the trust Adobe inspired allowed it to maintain its lead.
Two years later, Warnock had a revelation. Why not use PostScript to create portable documents? All they had to do was capture the PostScript stream generated by any application to obtain a file readable on any platform. This idea gave birth to Acrobat and the PDF format. For success to come, the Internet had to develop so that exchanging formatted documents would become an obvious necessity.
Adobe's triumph rests on remarkable insights. The company knew how to identify needs in the market. It maintained impeccable technical standards in typographic rendering. Its commercial strategy, which consisted of licensing PostScript to manufacturers rather than producing its own machines, proved judicious.
The PostScript language established principles that remain relevant today, such as the separation between document description and its rendering, freedom from hardware constraints, and uniform treatment of text and graphics. PDF, the direct heir of PostScript, reigns over global document exchange. Beyond these technical aspects, PostScript transformed the computer into a tool for graphic creation and communication, definitively wresting it from its status as a mere calculator.