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 finishing up our taxes. Soon after the Macintosh shipped in January of 1984, Alan got that rare look at the Future when he was handed, of all things, a tax form.
As you can imagine, Alan was at first not particularly excited by a paper 1040 form. But that was before he was told that the form had in fact just been printed by a new, secret product intended for the Macintosh: a personal laser printer, which would come to be known as the LaserWriter when introduced in January 1985.
Personal computer printers at that time were of two main types: dot matrix and inkjet. The original Mac included an optional dot matrix printer, the ImageWriter. These printers were fine for basic documentation purposes, but their output was slow and low resolution. They weren’t going to print tax forms acceptable to the IRS, or anything else that required any sort of detail.
The boring tax form in Alan’s hand that day foretold an exciting Future where Macs (and ultimately many other devices) would let individuals, as well as businesses great and small, print just about anything for themselves.
Alan didn’t know it at the time, but the Future he saw on that tax form would come to be called the desktop publishing revolution. And he would be privileged to play a number of roles in it.
