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 focus on AppleTalk’s role in tying the components of the LaserWriter together (literally).
AppleTalk had been under development since before the Mac was announced in January, 1984. The core Macintosh development team knew that the Mac’s Future involved a network system of some sort, but had too much to do before the announcement to work on that network system. So that job fell to the team Alan had recently been hired into.
At around the same time it became clear that the under-development LaserWriter (then known more poetically as the LightWriter) was also going to be an important part of the Mac’s Future. But there was a problem. The Future is often “already here” but it’s also often too expensive: a single LaserWriter was going to cost something like $7000 (around $20,000 in today’s dollars).
Although not under development for that reason, AppleTalk presented itself as the solution to the LaserWriter’s cost problem. AppleTalk could easily connect a dozen or so Macs to a single LaserWriter, making the printer affordable to the “small workgroup” market into which the Mac was already selling.
By design, the LaserWriter used that same 68000 CPU chip and underlying connectivity hardware (serial port) that the Mac did. So much of the work being done on AppleTalk for the Macintosh would also apply to the LaserWriter.
By mid 1984, the LaserWriter hardware was pretty much ready to go, with Adobe hard at work on the Postscript “firmware” that the LaserWriter would use to create the images it printed. AppleTalk was literally the missing link.
Alan’s job on the AppleTalk team was implementing the protocol (language) that AppleTalk would use to talk between Macs, and from Macs to other devices. It became clear that the LaserWriter would be the first thing Macs would talk to.
So Alan was off down the road (highway 101 to be precise) to that little company called Adobe Systems, to help deliver the LaserWriter’s Future. And his own.
