Month: May 2025
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Self-driving Cars
Sometimes the Future is not evenly distributed geographically. Self-driving cars have been part of the Future Future for quite some time. That Future is finally here, but it’s only available in certain locations. Waymo, part of Future distributor Alphabet, Inc., is a self-driving taxi service, currently available in parts of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix…
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1985: The LaserWriter, a brief interlude
A brief interlude to this set of posts: by October 1984, I (Alan) had been working for a year on AppleTalk for the Macintosh and LaserWriter. As a brief interlude to that work, I got to fly to Honolulu for the Apple annual worldwide sales conference. At the 1983 conference, the sales team had been…
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1985: A Little Network called AppleTalk
If there’s one word which summarizes Alan’s tenure at Apple, it’s AppleTalk. AppleTalk was the “network system” which, in the pre-Internet days, was used to connect Macintosh computers together and to many other devices. AppleTalk talk will likely take up even more chapters in this blog than this ongoing LaserWriter talk, but for now we’ll…
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1985: The LaserWriter and a little company called Adobe
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…
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