Adobe is born

John Warnock and Chuck Geschke named their company Adobe, after a little creek that ran behind the house of Warnock in Los Altos, California. You sometimes see it mentioned in wine guides on maps of Napa Valley where some of the most famous Californian wines are made.

At first, Warnock and Geschke thought of building a really powerful printer themselves but they soon realized that it would make more sense to develop tools for other manufacturers to control their printers.

It took Adobe 20 man-years to develop PostScript, a language that can be used to control output devices like laser printers.

1984: PostScript level 1

In 1984 PostScript was released. It was originally just called PostScript. ‘Level 1′ was added later to differentiate it from the more recent Level 2 upgrade.

PostScript is a very powerful language that looks a bit like Forth, another computer language. From the beginning, PostScript needed a pretty powerful system to run on. In fact, during the first years of its existence, PostScript printers had more processing power that the Macintoshes that were connected to them.

PostScript offered some huge advantages that other systems did not offer:

• PostScript was device independent. This means that a PostScript file can run on any PostScript device. On a laserprinter, you get 300 dpi output, while the same file gives you beautiful and crisp 2400 dpi output on an imagesetter. For users, this meant that they were no longer tied to one manufacturer and could choose the devices that best fit their purpose.
• Any manufacturer could buy a license for the PostScript interpreter and use it to build an output device.
• The specifications (syntax) of PostScript was freely available so anyone could write software that supported it.

PostScript takes off

PostScript was a pretty big gamble for Adobe and they might have failed to convince the market of its value if it hadn’t been for Steve Jobs from Apple Computer.

In 1985, sales of the Macintosh computer started to fall back and Apple really needed a killer application for its new baby. Steve Jobs liked the technology of Adobe, invested 2.5 million dollars in the company and convinced Warnock to create a PostScript controller for the Apple LaserWriter. This printer was similar to the HP LaserJet but the PostScript controller would allow it to output “typesetter quality” pages. The LaserWriter cost about US$7000. Today this may seem expensive (and it was!) but compare that to the first laser printer from Xerox, which, in 1978, cost US$500,000.

A computer linked to a powerful laser printer would not have made much of an impact but Apple and Adobe were fortunate enough to stumble upon a third partner, a small startup company that had created an application to utilize the Mac and LaserWriter to their full extent. The company was called Aldus and their software product was called PageMaker.

Desktop publishing was born and within a year, the combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript and PageMaker saved Apple and turned Aldus and Adobe into rich companies. Linotype was the first graphic arts supplier to recognize the value of PostScript and offer an imagesetter with its own PostScript RIP. Other manufacturers soon followed and PostScript quickly became the lingua franca of the prepress world.

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