Accidental Empires, Chapter 11 – Font Wars (1992)
cringely.com
cringely.com
I would love to read how Woz reflects on this. "Oh, well.. that was Steve" vibe I guess.
I was dealing with apples across this time, we had a Canon laser printer which was a giant barfridge beast but the print quality was awesome, and it was fast. All Apple had was "yea but it's small and it works well with your mac" which of course was all it needed once you were in Adobe print production. And for mass media you could make colour separates for bromide and real printing. But Maaan it was a pain for a Unix person to deal with that applenet crap.
We had a phototypesetter which had one guru who could drive it in nature, he spoke hex to it lovingly. Nothing compares to microfilm font. I loved the immediacy of the apple printer but for real camera ready 10,000dpi is where you went. It was slow, but gorgeous.
(Having read, or started to read, iWoz though, I have to say that Jobs is clearly a much more entertaining character. We all like Woz, but it's more fun to read about the mercurial Steve that plotted, schemed, made enemies.)
Say he played a roulette, he was allowed to bet on black or red, both 50-50 chance, but the black paid more. He betted on black always, and got crazy rich. I'd say it was the right decision, even in the cases when red was the outcome. I don't even understand why would one think otherwise, and say that it was a mistake?
"Visionaries" are like this. Nobody is going to mistake RMS for a saint, and he's a very odd man, but his wacky devotion to user freedoms has accomplished a lot.
Jobs had a lot of crazy ideas and a lot of good ideas, and he had the drive to make both the crazy and the good happen. Sometimes you gotta take all of it to get some of it.
BTW, I agree with you. Old school printing is superior in so many ways. There are a few businesses still doing letterpress printing because it is so... human. It's visual, it's tactile, and people respond to it. Cheap and easy never looks as good.
> ImageStudio was a better product with more features than Photoshop. But ImageStudio made a critical marketing mistake. Letraset gave one copy of ImageStudio to be reviewed by the editorial department. Adobe gave every person at MacWEEK a fresh box of Photoshop for their own. Adobe probably did the same at Macworld magazine as well. Instantly all reviews and buzz was around PhotoShop and ImageStudio was killed off.
If this made you curious, Letraset ImageStudio can be seen (and downloaded) here:
BTW, if you ever caught Cringely's PBS series where he tried to make a homebuilt aircraft it was a fascinating case study of hubris (Cringley's), modern construction vs. tried and true techniques, and another rare example of when a documentary that starts out about one thing decides to take on a life of its own and ends up going somewhere else.
Edit: looks like someone digitized their VHS copy of "Plane Crazy" and kindly uploaded to YouTube: https://youtu.be/FSNzF-KSGiw?si=2bK0aycpGpEzbydI