Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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A Future July 4
In 2004, Ashland was one of the first towns to webcast (stream) its July 4 parade. In 2007, Alan and company live-streamed the parade from the parade. As early as next year (July 4, 2026, for the U.S. Semiquincentennial) we hope to reprise those early glimpses of the Future with yet another early glimpse of…
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1985: The LaserWriter, Desktop Publishing
There was one additional important piece to the upcoming desktop publishing revolution. The combination of the Mac, LaserWriter, Postscript and AppleTalk let Mac users easily print, in very high quality, anything they could create and view on the Macintosh screen. But, as revolutionary as the Macintosh was, its 9-inch screen was black-and-white with a resolution…
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1985: The Macintosh Office, a not-so-epic ad
The Macintosh was introduced in early 1984 with an epic Super Bowl ad, “1984.” The Macintosh Office was introduced in early 1985 with a not-so-epic Super Bowl ad, “Lemmings.” Like much of the Mac’s introduction, “1984” was a rousing success. Like much of the Macintosh Office’s introduction, “Lemmings” wasn’t. “1984” opens with Big Brother (of…
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1985: LaserWriter, key to the Macintosh Office
The LaserWriter was the key piece of a larger effort, “The Macintosh Office,” to make the nascent Mac more appealing to the business market. That effort can perhaps best be summarized by a poster Apple put out at the time: The LaserWriter was literally at the center of the Macintosh Office, with the newly-announced “AppleTalk…
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1985: The LaserWriter, Apple’s high-end computer
One reason that it was practical to implement AppleTalk in both the Mac and LaserWriter at the same time was that the LaserWriter, by design, looked like a Mac to much of the software. It used the same 68000 CPU (processor) as the Mac, and the same SCC (serial communications) chip. The LaserWriter was actually…
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1985: The LaserWriter, technical difficulties
With manufacturing well underway, the LaserWriter was crashing. After a brief interlude at the Hawaii sales conference, the team was back at work finishing the software that would let the LaserWriter print from Macs connected to it through an AppleTalk network. There were a number of pieces: The Mac systems team was hard at work…
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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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