Long before Microsoft Office , there was theMacintosh Office , which was Apple ’s 1985 attempt to increase the nascent Mac ’s marketability as a occupation machine ( and which was complain off by the much - hatedLemmingscommercial ) . The Mac Office was a conception , not a product , but it was built around a new stopper - and - play networking architecture calledAppleTalk , and a breakthrough product call theLaserWriter . This laser printer , which was unlike anything else on the marketplace , could turn anyone into a publishing firm , all thanks to an plant technology calledPostScript , developed by a small company in California address Adobe Systems .
My business sector pardner and I became charter members of the Macintosh Office when we picked up the very first LaserWriter to go far in the Boston area . At $ 7,000 , it was the cardinal investment for our company and crucial for our new issue , MacInTouch . I can still remember the LaserWriter ’s downhearted Harkat-ul-Mujahidin as it started to print , and the snappy , beautiful type ( Times Roman and Helvetica — mundane today , but then a Revelation of Saint John the Divine ) that poured out upon its pages . While I bang using my Mac , it was the LaserWriter that really set me on the path to where I am today — and I ’m not alone in believing that it was a pivotal product in Apple ’s first successful button with the Mac .
The Mac ’s graphical port and products like Aldus’sPageMakerwere central components , but Adobe ’s PostScript was the mucilage that nurse it all together . If Steve Jobs — whopushed Appleto make it happen — hadn’t escort the wiseness and the power of PostScript joined with a laser printing machine , Apple certainly would not have become as relevant as it did to the nontextual matter industry . ( My favourite Steve Jobs minute is still the day in 1985 when he essentially called Hewlett - Packard head - dead for not putting PostScript into its optical maser printers . )
PostScript , which was really a programming speech used to account the geometry of a pageboy , outgrew the quickly discarded Macintosh Office and helped drive the background publishing revolution . In many slipway , Adobe was much like the early Apple — the party was forward-looking , flexible and tight .
But PostScript was the touchwood to grow Adobe ’s business , not the endgame . Adobe sagely used the royal line from licensing PostScript to printer maker to expand intotypography , illustration , digital imaging , video , and Web design . And , through it all , from the recent 1980s through the nineties , Apple and Adobe seemed like partners against the cold , business - oriented Microsoft / Intel hegemony . Adobe grew tremendously , first by purchasing Aldus , and then by branching out into video . And while Adobe agitate its software system onto Windows , it always felt as though the Mac was Adobe ’s true home . surely among designers , graphic artists and photographers — Adobe ’s inwardness demographic — the Mac , and Adobe ’s software , were the standard .
When Apple strike its rough patch in the mid-1990s , it was n’t the fanboys who kept Apple alive , it was the graphic community of interests : prepress operators , illustrators , publishing firm , photographers and others who relied upon their Macs to get their jobs done . The transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X was one that shake the heart of that community , and a large part of it stayed off until Photoshop , Acrobat , and Illustrator ( andQuarkXPress , to be fair ) made the conversion to the new OS .
The move to Mac OS X and with it , Apple ’s ever - increasing number of software claim , brought about anuneasy changein the dynamic between Apple and Adobe . Where the two had once seemed to be partners , they now behave more like adversaries and competitors , which of course they now are .
The biggest split was create by Apple ’s move into the video software market , both with iMovie and Final Cut Pro . Adobe see this as an intrusion into its territory , and strike back by seduce Premiere a Windows - only product ( a determination convert only this year ) . And , while iPhoto would never be seen as a competitor to Photoshop , Aperture certainly parent the stakes in the evolution of the digital imagination mart , and Adobe fired back with a year - farsighted public genus Beta of its next - generation imagery labor , Photoshop Lightroom , hoping to foreclose some of Aperture ’s momentum . And , over the past few years , I have often heard undercurrent of nastiness from people at both company . latterly , however , those sentiment seem to have been replaced by dear competitiveness , which is the way it really should be .
With this newfound competition , it ’s hard to tell right now how it will all turn out in the oddment , but the funny thing is that Apple and Adobe are as intertwine today as they were when the LaserWriter debuted . PostScript is still discover at the core of the Mac , a subset of Adobe ’s Portable Document Format ( PDF ) , which isembedded in the architectureof Mac OS X. Yes , 25 class after its initiation , Adobe ’s DNA is still part of Apple . In my mind , this is a good matter .
[ Rick LePage isMacworld ’s editor - at - enceinte and a contributor to the Creative Notes web log . ]
