Cats the world over are saddened...................
Cats the world over are saddened...................
“The obit is worth a read.
Not every man has an impact this huge and remain essentially unknown.”
Very true. I assume this is very common.
Not ersatz.
When they first came out I wondered why the pages weren’t smoking when they came out.
He ran out of toner, I guess.
bookmark
No relation to Charles I hope.
Yes, an excellent read, thanks for posting it.
It’s staggering how much innovation came out od Xerox PARC that Xerox piddled away.
Thank you, Mr. Starkweather, for your work, your doggedness, and your ingenuity.
I worked on these beasts in the early 80’s. Back when you fixed things that broke. I hated these machines with a passion. Constant paper handling and development issues.
In IT for years and never heard of him
Too bad Charles Starkweather is better known
I have a vintage Xerox mouse somewhere around here. it has a stainless steel base as well as a stainless steel mouse ball... If I understand it right, they invented that as well...
The real rise of personal laser printers took off after Steve Jobs got involved. Up until then, they were the office behemoths that the obit writes about. Jobs brilliantly saw the combination of the Mac, the new PostScript printing language, low-cost laser printers, the AppleTalk communications protocol and personal computer software for desktop publishing. From Wiki...
Jobs saw the LPB-CX at Xerox while negotiating for supplies of 3.5" floppy disk drives for the upcoming Apple Macintosh computer.John Warnock had left Xerox to found Adobe Systems in order to commercialize PostScript and AppleTalk in a laser printer they intended to market. Jobs was aware of Warnock's efforts, and he started working on convincing Warnock to allow Apple to license PostScript for a new printer that Apple would sell. Negotiations between Apple and Adobe over the use of Postscript began in 1983 and an agreement was reached in December 1983, one month before Macintosh was announced. Jobs eventually arranged for Apple to buy $2.5 million in Adobe stock.
At about the same time, Jonathan Seybold introduced Paul Brainerd to Apple, where he learned of Apple's laser printer efforts and saw the potential for a new program using the Mac's GUI to produce PostScript output for the new printer. Arranging his own funding through a venture capital firm, Brainerd formed Aldus and began development of what would become PageMaker. The VC coined the term "desktop publishing" during this time.
The LaserWriter was announced at Apple's annual shareholder meeting on January 23, 1985, the same day Aldus announced PageMaker. Shipments of the LaserWriter began in March 1985 at the retail price of $6,995, significantly more than the HP model. However, the LaserWriter featured AppleTalk support that allowed the printer to be shared among as many as sixteen Macs, meaning that its per-user price could fall to under $450, far less expensive than HP's less-advanced model. In 1988, the LaserWriter II was introduced at a much lower price point.
My wife worked at Apple during the Apple II, Apple III and Mac development days, leaving in 1988. After using a horrendous, screeching dot-matrix printer at home, we were able to purchase a LaserWriter II at a deep company discount in 1988.
So MANY brilliant minds came together during that period in the early and mid 80s that transformed everything we do in business. The irony is that laser printers are so commoditized today and people are finding less and less need to print pages that HP and Xerox are now in acquisition / merger discussions and are trying to figure out how to eventually get out of that money-losing business. HP thinks their printing future may be 3D additive printing.
I really like my laser printer. No more printer destroying ink clogs. Thank you Mr. Starkweather you relieved me of much frustration, stress and anger.
RIP.
Anyway as is usually the case in a company that is growing faster than it can keep up with the personnel, within five years I was managing all of the technical representatives from South San Francisco all the way to Monterey. Later when I refused to transfer to Rochester, I was given an accounts manager position in which my accounts were Varian, Syntex, Hewlett Packard and Ford Aerospace.
Earlier I had met all of the players at PARC including Starkweather. They used our offices in Santa Clara for all of the Alpha and Beta ethernet networking equipment. In about 1978 the corporate jet picked me up with representatives from all of those silicon valley firms that I represented and took us to Dallas and then on to Rochester where we saw the future of printing with the huge 9700 laser printer. Their goal was to achieve the merging of text and graphics. In 1980 I left Xerox and did a startup using two of the 9700's running a service company to replace dot matrix printing in Silicon Valley with the two laser printers. Business was very good and we hired five Israeli engineers from Stanford University to continue working on the merging of text and graphics on an IBM 370 which was our ultimate goal. We were very close when out of nowhere Jobs and Wozniak announced the Mac. Our funding and banking opportunities went south as interest rates and Jimmy Carter had caused our primary bank, Hibernia Bank, to fold. So that was that.
We're now the owners of an historical museum in southern Utah, but we own the best Xerox product for small business which merges text and graphics, prints great 13x19 posters and produces fine brochures and catalogs.
It’s amazing how much incredible development work was done by Xerox (especially at PARC) but they never marketed it.
The mouse was “invented” there, as was the basis of the MAC OS user interface, using the design based on SmallTalk, which was one of the first object-oriented programming languages (and integrated environment,) also invented there.
PARC, like AT&T’s Bell Labs, were really wonders of technology.
Mark
I’m impressed that the NY Times published anything only authored by a single person...
bttt