Antonoff: How Steve Jobs helped launch the desktop publishing revolution Apple gets credit for starting the smartphone revolution, but 30 years ago it launched another revolution with the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter.

Michael Antonoff | Special for USA TODAY

The original Hewlett-Packard LaserJet had come out the year before when on Jan. 28, 1985, a month before he would turn 30, Steve Jobs unveiled the LaserWriter at a press event in New York. Both printers used the same Canon engine modified from Canon's copier technology. Both could turn out 300 dots per inch (dpi) documents at eight pages per minute in gorgeous silence — quite a feat in a time when conversations were regularly cut short by the repetitive impact from an office printer.

The obvious difference was the price. The LaserJet was $3,500; the LaserWriter, $7,000. So, when I asked Jobs why someone should spend twice as much on Apple's laser printer, he went ballistic. "Because HP is brain-dead!" he exclaimed.

"It doesn't do graphics worth beans," he went on. "The text and fonts it prints are nowhere as beautiful or ambitious as what we're doing here."

It took another presenter, John Warnock, president of a 27-employee company called Adobe Systems, to compare the LaserJet in slightly more diplomatic terms.

"It goes nowhere. It's a daisy wheel replacement," he said referring to business letter-quality printers that hammered metallic characters in one font through an inked ribbon onto the page. "It has no growth potential in type, no growth potential in graphics, no growth potential in communications."

The LaserWriter was the first desktop printer to incorporate Adobe's PostScript, a page description language that contained scalable typefaces and supported smoothly drawn graphics. The same file created on a Macintosh computer and proofed on a LaserWriter could be output to a Linotronic 300 phototypesetter at 2,540 dpi, which was commercial quality.

Some context is helpful in understanding that 1985 event. Eight days earlier, Apple followed up on its 1984 Super Bowl commercial, still perhaps the most memorable in Super Bowl history, with an ill-conceived spot that disparaged potential Macintosh customers who instead bought IBM-compatible computers as lemmings going over a cliff.

The Mac in its nascent years was often seen more as a toy by corporate America than a serious computer, and its sales were dismal. But the LaserWriter with more computing power than a Mac might have been the leverage Apple needed to get its systems through the corporate door. In a way, Jobs was betting the future of the Mac on the LaserWriter. But time was running out. In May, Apple's board sided with John Sculley and stripped him of all executive duties; in September, Jobs resigned from Apple.

Despite his fall from grace at Apple, Jobs' bet on LaserWriter proved prophetic. Warnock says, "I think you need to know a story that is not widely known. In November or December of 1984, there was a meeting of marketing managers at Apple. Chuck (Geschke, Adobe co-founder) and I attended. The cost of the LaserWriter's components were about $7,000. There were NO margins in the machine because Steve wanted to sell it for $7,000.

"The majority of the managers thought Steve was crazy to announce the machine and that no one would buy a printer that was more than twice the cost of the computer. Steve said the high cost was due to the ROM (read-only memory) and RAM (random-access memory). Steve said that within a month or two, the cost of memory would drop (which it did), and therefore the machine would make money. He also argued that because the LaserWriter could be networked over AppleTalk, it could be used by more than one computer. He also understood that the ImageWriter (a dot matrix printer) would never be adequate in an office environment.

"Steve was passionate about the LaserWriter and overrode all of the manager's objections. In this case Steve deserves the reputation he has for changing the world."

As the LaserWriter was launched, the term "desktop publishing" entered the vernacular. One way to track usage is to search for a phrase in Google Books Ngram Viewer, which graphs the number of mentions in books by year. Starting in the mid-1980s occurrences of "desktop publishing" tracked steeply upward, peaking in 1992, then settling into a gentle downward slope into the new millennium.

The romantic age of desktop publishing lasted less than a decade. It was a time when if you were first to have a laser printer and the right software, you could elicit oohs and ahs from colleagues by handing them a printout. Unlike the typewriter-like text from a daisy wheel or the raggedness from a dot matrix printer, computer peripherals like the LaserWriter output bold headlines, proportional fonts, smooth curves and more than 50 shades of gray.

In San Francisco, neon "Desktop Publishing" signs glowed in storefronts and anyone with a couple of Macs and a LaserWriter could start a service bureau. Black-and-white film made a comeback since snapshots could readily be scanned and output at near-newspaper quality from your desk. With programs like Photoshop, you could manipulate the moon to dot the Transamerica Pyramid.

In the decade before blogging, everyone seemed to be starting a newsletter. Mine about a New Yorker adjusting to Northern California was called Bicoastal Living. With articles contrasting foie gras to chopped liver, the newsletter was written in WordStar, composed in PageMaker, output to a desktop laser printer and stuffed into two dozen envelopes. (That was the circulation.)

Having spent my earlier life ferrying typewritten copy to typesetters and picking up repro that went to paste-up artists whose boards were turned into blues that needed final proofing before plates were mounted on a printing press, you can imagine the exhilaration of producing Bicoastal Living at home alone.

Chuck Geschke's father and grandfather were both letterpress photoengravers. "These were the folks who made the four-color copper plates that were used to print the magazines, books, posters, marketing materials, packaging, etc. that drove the printing and publishing industry around the world," Geschke says.

"For both John (Warnock) and me, as we look back to the desktop publishing years, we are humbled to realize that in roughly one decade we and our business partners transformed the entire printing and publishing industry from a toxic, dangerous chemical and mechanical process to a fully digital system. You cannot find a piece of printed material today that our technology has not helped to create. Pretty damn exciting for us."

Tony Bove, an early expert about desktop publishing and a book author, says "the LaserWriter put me in business as a magazine and newsletter publisher for a niche market and spawned hundreds of thousands of niche-market publications and 'zines. The ability to create page layouts made possible graphical novels and comics for international readers. The page layout programs laid the foundation for the webpages we take for granted today."

Bove is now manager of publishing and training at Deem, a business services company. He recently recalled that at a 1988 publishing conference he attended, Paul Brainerd, chief of Aldus and developer of PageMaker, held up a book Bove had co-authored, Desktop Publishing With PageMaker, translated into Polish and printed on a LaserWriter. "He proudly explained that the combination had been instrumental in producing broadsheets that helped the Solidarity movement win the Polish elections."

Reflecting on the times, Bove says, "Page makeup programs transformed the world by giving publishing power to the people."

As for Steve Jobs, not long after returning to Apple in 1997 he realized that the money from printers was in consumables — not hardware — and other companies were much better suited to that business. So, he discontinued Apple's printer line. Ironically, when you go to Apple's online store today the majority of the printers being offered for sale carry a familiar brand that Jobs once disparaged. That's right —it's HP.