The LaserWriter would tie in one additional piece of Xerox’s fumbled Future. To go with its laser printer, Xerox had developed a page description language called Interpress. Interpress would allow the graphics from any personal computer to be printed in a resolution-independent manner on any type of printer.
Two researchers at Xerox PARC saw the Future potential of Interpress, but couldn’t convince Xerox of that Future. So John Warnock and Chuck Geschke left PARC to start their own company to help distribute that Future, first in Warnock’s garage and then in a small building down the road from PARC.
Similar to how Steve Jobs saw the Mac’s Future at Xerox PARC, he saw the LaserWriter’s Future at Warnock and Geschke’s new company, Adobe Systems. The Postscript page description language they were developing at Adobe would let the LaserWriter print the Mac’s graphics with impressive quality (on a 1040 tax form, but in much more creative endeavors too).
The LaserWriter hardware was built around an underlying print engine for Canon. Apple and Adobe provided the remaining Xerox-fumbled elements. Alan got to help (upcoming chapters).
Adobe, of course, would go on to leverage their work with Postscript and the LaserWriter to be at the forefront of the desktop publishing revolution, and from there to such now-household names as Photoshop and PDF (based on Postscript).
The company would ultimately move from its tiny building in Palo Alto to a number of the dominant buildings in the San Jose skyline. The current value of Adobe Systems is well over $100 billion.
