Author: Alan Oppenheimer

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” In the 1970s and early 80s, the Future was stuck at Xerox. Most of us think of Xerox (and xeroxing) as the distant past, but Xerox and their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) invented and then gloriously failed to distribute much of the Future…

As mentioned, the story about helping distribute the Future brought about by the LaserWriter is going to have a number of chapters. It’s long enough that it merits a table of contents: It may take a while to get through all this. To whet your appetite, an interesting tidbit about the LaserWriter: “LaserWriter” was not…

This is going to be a long story, with a number of chapters. Once in a great while you get a little glimpse of something you know is going to be the Future. And sometimes you’re actually right. Even more rarely, you get to help too. This weekend many of us in the U.S. are…

When it shipped in 1987, the “Open Mac” Macintosh II let third parties create plug-in cards and associated software to bring features to the Macintosh line that would not otherwise be available. It enabled Apple itself to do the same. It was on the Mac II that Alan led an Apple effort to bring Ethernet…