The Dawn of Desktop Publishing - Computerphile
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- čas přidán 11. 03. 2014
- Quality printing from your own home is taken for granted, but it wasn't always that way - The Apple Laserwriter gave the original Apple Mac a purpose and cemented its place in the creative industries. We hear from Professor David Brailsford.
Unrolling the Loops - • Unrolling the Loops - ...
Little Mac with the Big Bite: • The Little Mac with th...
Great 202 Jailbreak: • The Great 202 Jailbrea...
For further reading on John Warnock and Steve Jobs check out Conrad Taylor's report on John Warnock: bit.ly/warnockreport
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at: bit.ly/bradychannels
This man is the David Attenborough of computer science
I'm subscribed to nearly 300 channels, but who'd have thought that the most enjoyable time I would have on CZcams would be watching videos with an old man speaking about printers. These are great, keep them coming!
About the genuine fonts being used in the Laserwriter rather than lookalikes, firstly I find it strange that it was Jobs who wanted to use lookalikes and it was John Sculley, the sugar water salesman, that had to convince Steve to include the proper fonts.
It was the right decision, Microsoft went with the lookalikes (Arial instead of Helvetica) and Linux had no choice (open source projects given out free of charge can't include fonts that cost money)
Microsoft also gave us Comic Sans and we are all eternally thankful.
"When you roll, you gotta roll, you can't stop." Prof. David Brailsford, 2014
#yoroll #swag
2MB of RAM -- that was a LOT back then. I can remember my laser printer back in those days (it wasn't an Apple Laserwriter) which had only 1MB of RAM. It had the option to be upgraded to more, but RAM was so unbelievably expensive back then that I couldn't afford it after having bought the printer and a couple of font-cartridges.
At any rate, related to what Professor Brailsford said about not being able to stop once you'd started rolling out the page, with only 1MB of RAM it was quite easy to create a page that took too much of the printer's memory, and simply would not print! You'd get an "out of memory" error and it would stop processing entirely. I can remember playing around with font-sizes and vector-graphics to get my documents to be as close to what I desired as they could be, yet still fit within the restrictions of the 1MB of RAM in my printer.
I remember when I finally had enough money to upgrade my printer to 2MB of RAM -- what an absolute JOY that was, because I could stop worrying about running out of memory in my laser printer. At 300 dpi, a letter-sized page-image could fit entirely in 2MB of RAM, no matter how complex it was.
We've come so far since then. 1200 dpi laser printers that print at 26 ppm are commonplace now - and SO cheap! Back then you'd spend THOUSANDS of dollars (or pounds, if you're in the U.K.) and still have some pretty stiff limitations.
I'm truly enjoying this series with Prof. Brailsford. Makes me appreciate how much technology has advanced in my lifetime. And how much farther we can still go! Keep up the good work!
I worked with a guy who wrote in Postscript which he described as being much like Forth. The customer wanted 1000 page reports printed from a database. They could already do it but each page made the printer think for about 2 minutes. He found a way to have the printer digest the database raw. The printer then printed as fast as the output would go. I think that was on an apple laser writer 1. Would have been 1985 or 1986. Watching him debug it was great. He'd fire up this printer that cost a year's wages. Load the data. It would think for a minute or so and then start spitting out blank pages, occasionally interspersed with a single line. "Ohh, I think it's 2048 times too big..." He got there in the end. We were all blown away.
What a disconnect between the EE department, which could fix that power supply instantly but has no clue about the PS language & the CS department, which is utterly helpless with the power supply but can explain the PS language.
Professor Brailsford should get a 10h show on the History channel. I never get bored and always crave for more....
2:05
Is that why the old print we had made the paper it printed warm? Always loved getting a freshly printed peace of paper.
If you had a laser printer then yes. Laser printers still need to do that. It's also the reason why the toner on a half printed page will just fall off the paper when you pull it out of a printer to fix a paper jam.
Professor Brailsford is so good at showing and explaining computing history. He'd be the perfect grandfather for real nerds like me :D
I don't usually comment, but wow this guy can talk! Always thought I was more of a software kind of guy, but when this guy talks he makes me want to read up on stories of computer hardware past!
This talker is one of my fav in computerphile :)
I first used a Mac in 1986. PageMaker and a LaserWriter in 1987. I was impressed then, and remain impressed to this day.
In a later job one of our products was a PostScript cleaner application. Its main function was massaging PostScript to make the output more compatible with hyper-resolution output devices that imaged printing plates at thousands of DPI.
One of my demos was the Towers of Hanoi in PostScript. Send the file to the printer, it thought for a few seconds, then printed a page with the moves on it.
and people say apple never innovated...
I could listen to this guy all day. I wish he was my uncle or an old family friend and I could spend hours at a time talking to him about computers.
Please do more on type setting! Please get Professor David Brailsford to speak the TeX type setting engine.
I cannot believe i just discovered this channel... This is amazing!
I always wondered about the PS-PDF relationship, can't wait for the supplement video! Now what are Type 3 fonts and why are they pure PS?
I miss the LaserWriter 16/600 PS. They had one in my junior high - it was a *fantastic* printer.
This guy is brilliant. An absolute mine of fascinating information. Love it!
I totally remember those sheets from grade school in our computer room. Old Skool.
That limited font selection would have been an improvement from the fonts most powerpoint presentations tend to use.
Who are you watching doing powerpoints? Kids? Professional scientists rarely use funny fonts. For figures, I use Myriad Pro, and for powerpoint, I leave it at the default, so like Calibri. For posters, the main text is Time New Roman, the section headers are Calibri, only the title uses a non standard font. I can only remember one scientist out of over 100 who used something stupid, like Comic Sans or Courier.
cbernier3 Arguably one of the most important discoveries of the past decade was the Higgs boson. Guess what font was used in the presentation? That's right, motherfucking Comic Sans. Just saying: offering ugly options to users will cause some users to make horrible choices. "Professional scientist", too.
how far we've come...
I like this guy.. more please
Man. Unrolling loops... that was the first optimization technique I ever learned. Looking forward to that vid.
This is an amazing video. And an amazing professor.
The plugs on the Appletalk logo on the bootup sheet, look like the new and the old iPhone docking plug.
Brilliant bit of history, couldn't be presented any better. Thank you so much Sean and David! People brush off history as something that we don't need to know in order to build a future, but that couldn't be more wrong. Humans are humans, and human need, logic and reasoning have not changed. Modern innovation is bound by many of the same common factors that have affected the birth of all of these historical products and respective markets.
Hmm - I'm probably not the first - but whatever happened to the extra bits video about unrolling the loops?
Small correction: the four-pin port that Prof. Brailsford points to as the AppleTalk port is actually an Apple Desktop Bus port. (I've no idea what its use was supposed to be on the LaserWriter. It was normally used to connect keyboards and mice to the Mac in pre-USB days.) Both AppleTalk (LocalTalk) for connecting to a Mac network and ordinary serial connection (to an IBM-style PC) would run out of the other port.
This is really interesting stuff. Any recomendations on computer history books? I only some vague details about it.
So many memories!
Best professor ever! 👨🏻🏫
Most of the time computer history seems and sounds a bit abstract, but this series makes history of computer much more tangible and quotidian (in a good way).
Love this! We even still have (and actually use) an Apple Laserwriter. We use it for heat transfer.
Actually in 1984 there was a company called Apollo which rolled out a BSD Unix system ( Aegis ) which ran a piece of software called PanValet and that was a real desktop publishing and document management system and it drove PostScript Laser Printers. It was also horrificly expensive.
The Apple of those days was an entirely different company than it is today.
Just think of it this way: Once upon a time there was this cool RainbowApple company and it has nothing to do with Apple Inc.
bad caps. Replacing the capacitors in the power supply should bring one of those laser printers back to life.
Exactly. Replacing all electrolyte caps should suffice, though.
I LOVE this man!
"When you roll, you gotta roll, you can't stop."
#swag
I have the original LaserWriter, although it has had its ROM upgraded to the LaserWriter Plus. It still prints too, albeit with issues which mean the paper comes out crinkled.
These old printers ran like crazy. I had an old apple laserwriter that still ran perfectly and could pump out pages all day a decade after it was released. Original toner cartrige too.
Haha, noticed the "C -> LLVM" diagram in the background, interesting stuff ^^
You are amazing and a fantastic storyteller! I just have to sbscribe. Thanks for doing this.
Somehow I just love listening to David. Doesn't really matter what the subject matter is. Also, I remember being so confused about Duff's device when I first saw it, wonder if he's going to mention it.
Just as a comparison, the Commodore Amiga 1200 had a 68EC020, which was a lower cost version of the 68020 that's used in that printer.
Though my memory may be faulty, I'm pretty sure the Laserjet/Lasrwriter II used the EC version too - they were after all the Embedded Controller version - developed for exactly this kind of application - Commodore used them in a bid to save a few bucks, but they actually made sense in a printer.
we had a mac room in high school. I could have sworn the bootup page would also report the CPU?
Which i recall because it was irritatingly better specced than the Macs in the room as well as my Amiga at home
This man, he is awesome.
I keep hearing of good things that Apple did in the 80s. Maybe if I'd grown up a decade earlier instead of in the 90s/00s, I wouldn't hate them so much. It's a shame they've gone so far down hill to just making overpriced crap nowadays.
You just have to replace the old caps in the power supplies. Then they'll be happy again.
Can you make a vídeo explaining how does a computer defines the frequency in which he reads data. I mean, there must be one, otherwise I don't know how it would differenciate "001"from "01" (two 0's in a row), and the frequency must be alterable, otherwise the transfer rate would always be the same.
disconnect the fuser than warm the page under a heat lamp.
6:54 With clone fonts, I think a more accurate retort would be, "You drink Coke, don't you? How do you feel, Steve, if I offer you a can of RC Cola?"
And those spider box producers would nowadays face patent lawsuits from Apple, right?
Heh now there's a whole can of worms :-)
Especially if you go back in time to when Jobs went to Xerox Parc to see what they were doing, and came away with some ideas.
Very interesting
68020 overclocked? I've done tons on 68000, multitasking.. running a tracker, text application and FFT graphical synthesis, all at the same time.. on 1mb ram..
Fun Fact: modern day iOS renders its GUI with an interface that is extremely close to how PDF defines graphics. As such, it's extremely easy (and fast) to code PDF readers for Apple, because you just have to pipe the PDF into the operating system.
Long story, and in the end it went totally and horrendously wrong, but in short we were going to run our Linotron 202 from two Mac computers. I wanted Linotype APL1000 terminals running CORA V side by side with Quark, as we moved on to an imagesetter of some sort, but told I was wrong by someone who'd never spent a day doing what I did. In the end he sourced Serif Software's answer to CORA V run on two Macs.
The Macs were 8/80 machines, and without wanting to sound crude, the salesman must have worked himself into a state of frenzy he didn't want, or probably need, relations with his partner for days after because of it.
8/80 Macs meant they had 8Mb of ROM and 80Mb of RAM - not Gb but Mb. The salesman assured us we would NEVER need 80Mb of ROM which of course was nonsense as within two years some files exceeded that alone.
Sadly, running CORA V on the Macs was never entirely successful and the whole thing was a colossal waste of money. But then, what did those who actually used the systems, even though in no way computer people, know?
All the fusers I have seen run on mains current.
Why... hasn't brady gotten one of the smarty pants from the university to come up and fix the printer? Put a new power supply!
I dont know looks like a shelf piece to me. Those things loved to cook their own insides. I think it is more true to the tech to leave it cooked, that is what they are remembered best for.
I thought that you send bitmap to the printer, not commands... But than I saw "9600" and understood why...
2 mb RAM... some mb of ROM... it's crazy how today we can have all this in a microcontroller
It's also pretty crazy how I opened up a tablet PC with 8gb of storage, and found the Flash memory to be just a single chip... Today; 8gb = 1 chip. 1987; 2 mb = 16 chips... an improvement by a factor of 64,000 - (And 8gb isn't even the largest thing going at the moment.)
MB as in MegaBytes, Not to be confused with MegaBits
Dunno DoYou True enough. Though all my examples are Bytes NOT bits. (8 GigaBYTES of flash, 2 megaBYTES of ram.) - It should be noted that an 8 gigabyte flash memory chip is a 64 gigabit chip...
Also worth mentioning is that my comparison isn't entirely fair because I'm comparing flash memory to RAM, and these two technologies tend to have different densities. (That same tablet had 1 gigabyte of ram, which I believe consisted of 2 chips, so the density of ram is somewhat lower it seems...)
now you can have 128 GB micro sd card www.sandisk.com/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2014/sandisk-introduces-worlds-highest-capacity-microsdxc-memory-card-at-128gb/
Gentleman, re-cap your power supplies
cheers granddad. another excellent v-log.
Steve - Using the Coke-Pepsi joke before it becomes mainstream.
Ask Ben Heck to take your LaserWriter and replace the power supply with something a bit more modern :-)
Cool.
Any kind-hearted technicians out there fancy becoming famous?
Apple LaserWriter II 2 Blinking Lights Repair Kit/Fixing Temperature Malfunction
www.fixyourownprinter.com/kits/apple/K49
Everyone is obsessed with 3D printers, but boy if all the hardware hackers could design a cost effective 2D printer I'd be more happy. ;)
c
it's funny because Pepsi bought apple
hwat? Pepsi bought Apple? I knew some Pepsi marketing guy (John Sculley) was a CEO of Apple for some time, but I didn't know Pepsi bought them...
wat?
GreenJalapenjo That's probably more likely, it was really late and I couldn't be bothered to research. Joke still holds though.