BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and was one of the first widespread programming languages, after FORTRAN and COBOL and even Pascal. They were all sort of used around the same time period. All fall short of C, C+, C++, and now the many superior programming languages.
I actually wrote a program in BASIC to calculate mortgages or any loan. The program asked for the original loan amount, the annual interest rate, and the number of months on the loan. The program then asked if you wanted the output displayed on the screen or printed on the printer. The program then calculated the monthly payment (and the formula for that is fairly complex in and of itself – check out the formula in Microsoft Excel). The output showed the monthly payment amount, the beginning monthly balance, the amount of the monthly payment, the amount of the payment that went to interest, and the amount of the payment that went to pay off the loan (principal amount), and the ending monthly loan amount. And the program showed/printed all the payment “lines” for the entire duration of the loan.
In college I changed my major several times. As a freshman at Ricks College, I majored in pre-medicine. As a sophomore at BYU-Provo I majored in computer science when it was just beginning to be called computer science instead of computer programming which is what I took for a semester in high school. In my junior year at BYU-Provo I switched to accounting. And, finally, in my senior year at BYU-Provo I majored in business with emphases (plural for emphasis) in marketing and finance. So I have a bachelor’s degree in business marketing and finance with a little accounting and sort of a minor in computer science (not actually enough computer science classes for a full-blown CS minor). I really wish we had just stayed and gotten the B.S. in C.S., the M.S. in C.S., the B.S. in Accounting, maybe the M.S. in Accounting, and the M.B.A. with emphases in marketing and finance.
In one of my accounting classes in 1982, a professor prophesied, “I predict with the advent of computer science that anyone who majors in BOTH accounting and computer science will make at least FIVE TIMES the annual income of the person who majors in just accounting OR computer science!” Then to bolster his claim, he added, “Accountants really only study and understand accounting in just small areas like taxation (e.g. business, partnership, personal, etc), auditing, general management, consulting, accounting procedures, and on and on ad nauseam and indefinitely, while computer scientists understand computer science in just a few of its various aspects (let’s not even start to list, let alone, define, the many facets involved), BUT nobody understands BOTH accounting AND computer science. The computer scientists can’t elucidate to the accountants how computer science principles function in the world of accounting NEITHER can the accountants explicate to the computer scientists how accounting principles apply in the digital arena. That person who understands BOTH computer science AND accounting will rule the planet. May I suggest that just a master’s degree in each discipline will do – no need for PhDs unless you plan to teach at the university level.” Very true way back then, and still somewhat true today.
I think the professor gave the following as a simple example of understanding both worlds: computer science and accounting. In just the business world of real estate mortgages, the “rounding” of numbers was extremely important but hardly noticed by lenders or payment makers. I remember learning to round numbers at View Ridge Elementary school in Everett, Washington, in the 1960s back when the Beatles were starting to make it big, Billy Joel was trying to pound out a career as the Piano Man in Manhattan bars, The Who (another rock band) was just heard of, the Bee-Gees weren’t even initials yet, and Taylor Swift was decades from even being conceived.
So back to rounding… All the .5 cents rounded up to the next penny while .49 cents rounded down. A clever computer “programmer “who understood computer programming AND accounting AND the power of multiplying even in small increments became a multi-millionaire. He was hired to write computerized amortization mortgage schedules for real estate loans. Since no one really cared about amounts less than a penny, he transferred the minuscule rounded up amounts into a personal, private bank account.
Eventually, someone realized what he had done or maybe he leaked what he had done. Even when “caught” no one really cared because no one missed a few un-accumulated cents out of a very large loan. After all, we are really only talking about half pennies or half cents or have sense or horse sense which in the long run won’t amount to much, unless you are a clever computer programmer AND you know how to round up and transfer a penny here and a penny there into your own personal bank account.
A billion half cents, that no one mortgage lender or mortgage payer will notice as a half cent, will add up to $5 million (dollars) for the clever computer programmer who just stole in such small increments that no one cared, and the half cents mattered to no one, except for the clever computer programmer who understood computer programming and accounting and the power of multiplying even in small increments… A billion half cents is only $5,000,000 that almost no one notices – except the programmer!
A few classic examples of experts in computers (sort of computer science) and business (sort of like accounting) include (without stealing money, just ideas):
Starting with:
Bill Gates, co-founder of the juggernaut Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Mr. Gates was actually not schooled in either computers or business, but he knew how to hire people who were loaded with talent in both areas. A journalist interviewed Mr. Gates and asked him, “How did you become the richest person in the world (like ten years in a row, until, at age 50, he unceremoniously retired fully from Microsoft (even gave up the title of Chairman of the Board) and he donated most of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, primarily so Warren Buffet could finally become the richest person in the world for once, after being runner-up for so many years. Even Mr. Buffet is donating tons of money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and he is trying to get other gazillionaires to do the same.
Anyway, in answer to the interviewer’s question, Mr. Gates humbly said something on the order of, “One, I was just lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. That is, I was in the computer industry when it started to explode. But being lucky didn’t make me the richest man in the world. Lots of people have been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Two, I took action. When IBM came calling, asking for a Disk Operating System for their as yet un-introduced or even built, personal computer. Microsoft was chartered to develop computer languages like GW-BASIC (Gee-Whiz Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Without signing all the non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with IBM, I sent the blue-suits to my friend in the Bay Area who wrote operating systems (can anybody remember CP/M or what the acronym stands for (I guessed Computer Protocol Management (I figured “Computer” would be in there), but after Googling “CPM operating system” Wikipedia says that CP/M stands for Central Program/Monitor – ha, missed all three words, and Wikipedia adds that CP/M was later backronymed (can anybody say, “Great word invention”) “Control Program for Microcomputers”) or who the writer/owner was? (Wikipedia says Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M – Gary’s name was buried on page four. CP/M was written in Kildall’s own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). In 1980 IBM approached Digital Research to license a forthcoming version of CP/M for their new product, the IBM Personal Computer. Upon their failure to obtain a signed non-disclosure agreement, the talks failed, and IBM instead used Microsoft to provide an operating system. Enough of Gary who was just afraid to sign NDAs with Big Blue). “The IBMers came back to me (Bill Gates) and asked for advice. I wasn’t going to let this once-in-a-lifetime chance pass by again. Friend or no friend, operating systems or computer programming languages aside, I immediately signed IBM’s complex NDAs (without reading them, thus setting an easy precedent, much like today’s users do not read Microsoft’s legal contractual agreements – as Dave Barry put it, everyone just clicks the “I agree with whatever the hell the damn form says” button, and we get on with it), and promised IBM a working operating system in less than a month. We had no clue how we would conjure up an operating system in such a short period of time. So without telling the very-small-operating-system company in Seattle that I had a potentially huge deal in the works with IBM, I borrowed money and bought QD-DOS (Quick and Dirty – Disk Operating System) for $15,000 whole dollars – what a deal. With a little debugging (and lots over the decades to follow) and editing, we provided IBM with its first operating system for the IBM Personal Computer. But being lucky and taking action did not make me the richest man in the world. Third, and this is what created my wealth, I had vision! I could see the day when every home would have at least two or three computers, and cars would have onboard computers to manage things, ovens would contain computer chips to digitally control the oven temperature, homes would have computers built into the heating and air conditioning controller and computers would operate the security system and automatically call the police in the event of a burglary and dial the fire department if there were a fire, satellites would use computers to share information, photos of earth, cell phone calls, and more, to summarize: Computers would be everywhere and Microsoft’s operating system and eventually Windows would operate the computers and coordinate CD/DVD drives, printers, and more and more and more…”
Paul Allen, the lesser co-founder of the juggernaut Microsoft, with the other, richer co-founder, Bill Gates. I don’t know what Mr. Allen brought to the table, but he started the startup with his friend from their freshman year at Harvard. An abrupt heart attack in the early 1980s sidelined Mr. Allen and he used his wealth to indulge in another hobby: basketball. He bought the Portland Trailbazers and has hardly looked back, except to maybe count his stock in Microsoft and his NBA team.
Steve Jobs, co-founder of the smaller juggernaut, Apple Computer Company, is perhaps the quintessential dual computer-business geek, although, like Mr. Gates, Steve Jobs wasn’t schooled in either discipline – actually, less, he sort of studied “calligraphy” or handwriting fancy letters, but that interest helped produce amazing fonts and typefaces for the Mac, when the PC in 1984 only really knew Courier, Courier Italic, and Courier Bold (on the typewriter to get bold print you just kept smacking the key until the letter was bolder or until the paper tore, whichever came first). In Mr. Jobs own words at a Stanford University Commencement in 2005, “I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: ‘We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?’ They said: ‘Of course.’ My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.”
Read the entire address online or in the attached file. Just a little more about Mr. Jobs taken mostly from a TIME magazine Special Commemorative Issue upon Steve Job’s untimely, early death in 2011. The issue was entitled, “The Genius Who Changed Our World.” Jobs graced the covers of eight TIME magazines, although in one he shared the cover with other “Most Influential People in the World.” The article titles in the Commemorative Issue are noteworthy and cleverly wordsmithed, and provide a chronology and summary of his genius: “Steve Jobs Engineered His Dreams – And Ours”, “The Icon of Apple”, “The Real Genius of Steve Jobs” starts with, “Steve Jobs knew us, but we did not know him. We are Jobs’ area of expertise. He wasn’t a computer scientist, after all. He had no training as a hardware engineer or an industrial designer. His education consisted of a semester at Reed College…. Because he was a genius, Jobs was able to teach himself a lot about computers. But he taught himself everything about the humans who used [the computers]. This is all the more extraordinary because Jobs’ mind worked so differently from most humans’ [minds]. He understood us down to the atomic level…. It’s a rule of thumb in the world of technology that you get to revolutionize one industry at most, but Jobs did it to a new industry every few years with stunning regularity – computers, then movies, then music, then phones….”, “The Mouse That Roared”, “Beauty and The Bytes” starts with, “Steve Jobs was one of the greatest biologists of our time. The late Apple chief will be rightly remembered for his design and marketing genius, but it was his understanding of the look and behavior or organisms – not to mention the psychology of the most sophisticated organism of all – that is the reason he’s being so deeply mourned. Human beings have always loved to biologize (great new word) their machines. Favorite old cars don’t just break down; they die. Computers don’t power down; they sleep. Manual typewriters and obsolete turntables are spoken of with a teary fondness usually reserved for late relative….”, “Pixar’s Magic”, “The Seeds of Apple”, “Exit The King” (he was ousted from Apple in 1985, just two years after he hired his new boss, John Skulley from Pepsico), “The Comeback Kid” (thankfully Skulley was forced to quite in 1993, the company almost tanked, and thankfully Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996 as “interim” CEO, a role he played for the rest of his life (until 2011)), “A Man In Full”, and finally, “iMourn The Loss”.
A few distinguished people have changed a single industry in a lifetime. Consider Thomas Edison and lighting with the incandescent lightbulb (only recently being replaced with fluorescent lights) or Henry Ford and the automobile industry with his assembly-line manufacturing or Fred Smith who overnight revolutionized overnight shipping, especially or FedExing a box and now even a letter. From the About FedEx button at www.FedEx.com. “In 1965, Yale University undergraduate Frederick W. Smith wrote a term paper about the passenger route systems used by most airfreight shippers, which he viewed as economically inadequate. Smith wrote of the need for shippers to have a system designed specifically for airfreight that could accommodate time-sensitive shipments such as medicines, computer parts and electronics. (At BYU in 1983, FedEx and Fred Smith were already legendary. One professor added to the “term-paper” story by saying Mr. Smith got a “C+” grade (not the computer language) with a professor’s scribbled note, “This could never work. The idea has to at least be plausible to get a decent grade.” And I’ve seen that on lists of dumbest things anyone said, like Bill Gates who declared after many memory struggles and enhancements, “64K (of RAM) ought to be enough for anybody”). In August of 1971 following a stint in the military, Fred Smith bought controlling interest in Arkansas Aviation Sales, located in Little Rock, Ark. While operating his new firm, Smith identified the tremendous difficulty in getting packages and other airfreight delivered within one to two days. This dilemma motivated him to do the necessary research for resolving the inefficient distribution system. Thus, the idea for Federal Express was born: a company that revolutionized global business practices and now defines speed and reliability. Federal Express was so-named due to the patriotic meaning associated with the word “Federal,” which suggested an interest in nationwide economic activity. At that time, Smith hoped to obtain a contract with the Federal Reserve Bank and, although the proposal was denied, he believed the name was a particularly good one for attracting public attention and maintaining name recognition. The company incorporated in June 1971 and officially began operations on April 17, 1973, with the launch of 14 small aircraft from Memphis International Airport. On that night, Federal Express delivered 186 packages to 25 U.S. cities from Rochester, NY, to Miami, Florida…. or Warren Buffet who changed investment banking forever and legally without going to jail for anything… But I digress again…
Back to Mr. Jobs transforming four industries: 1. Computers (from the original Apple I to the Lisa to the original Mac in 1984 to MacPros, etc.), 2. Cell phones (think iPhone, late but still a revolution in and of itself), 3. Movies with Pixar and blockbuster hits like the Toy Story franchise, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. (kids don’t even know that inc. means incorporated, but they don’t need to know to enjoy the movie), Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Cars 2., and finally, 4. Music with iTunes and iPods (late, but still revolutionary in nature) and iPads and more.
Steve Jobs melded research and development (technology (computer science)) with business/marketing. He was mostly a sales guy. He didn’t really know much about running a business, and he even lured a real marketing whiz from PepsiCo, John Skulley, after weeks of negotiation, by finally asking, “Look. Do you want to just sell sugar-water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” Skulley left PepsiCo (I believe he actually worked for his father-in-law – talk about a “cushy” job working for your wife’s pop (pun intended)). Skulley got to get his cake and drink it, too. Then he became Steve Job’s new boss, and, in less than a decade, ran Apple Computer Company into the so far into the ground, its amazing the company survived. In a stroke of pure genius, the Apple board brought back Mr. Jobs who clearly didn’t need the money, but loved the technology, and perhaps more, he loved the complexity of the human interface and the human experience with all things technical. By the way, from Wikipedia again, “John Sculley (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993. In May 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley‘s top-paid executive, with an annual salary of $2.2 million.” (How things have changed, in executive salaries, that is). Some distinction, to be the top-paid executive at company that he nearly ruined. The Wikipedia article said something about Skulley’s ambition and aspirations to become president and CEO of PepsiCo, but he lacked the business and marketing prowess required to head said (nice rhyme) soda company.
So the Apple board rehired Mr. Jobs as “interim CEO”. And Mr. Jobs resurrected the otherwise dying company (another play on words) during the late 1990s and all of the 2000s into 2011 when he passed away. At the 1997 Macworld Expo, with sales and finances struggling, he announced that he had secured a $150 million investment from archrival Microsoft. TIME magazine wrote, “Some of the faithful [Apple fanatics] were less than pleased about the 1997 deal with rival Microsoft and its CEO, Bill Gates.” Although it was quite obvious, Jobs did not announce that the $150 million investment, not a loan, was to keep the floundering (that is, splashing, struggling, thrashing, dithering) Apple afloat (great wordplay using a water analogy with one more coming up), but Mr. Gates was not bobbing for Apples (another good wordplay) – it was more than a generous gesture to keep the five-percent-computer-market share Apple in the competitive mix. Microsoft typically has over $10 billion in cash reserves – a tad bit more than petty cash (a genuine accounting term!) and plenty to invest a mere $150 million in any company. Mr. Gates needed the competition and creative mind of Jobs to keep Microsoft’s technology and marketing in the competitive fray. And I’ve always thought that with Apple’s mounting losses of $1.5 billion over 18 months, $150 million is kind of just chump change, although it is ten percent of the $1.5 billion so maybe that is a lot.
Mr. Jobs supplied Mr. Gates with lots of ideas over the years. In the early 1980s, Jobs borrowed and otherwise plagiarized several of the Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) clever ideas. Jobs got a personal guided tour of the research center in the very early 1980s and he quickly picked up on the little mouse device which made it easy for engineers, architects, designers, and others to quickly reference corners, edges, lines, and more, instead of the tedious counting of dots and inputting esoteric “x-y” coordinates on graphs. And the Graphical User Interface (GUI, pronounced Gooey rather than spelled G-U-I to save time and it just sounds cool – gooey) was not lost on the young Skywalker (sorry, wrong young-future-great guy) …on the young Steve Jobs. However, Jobs completely missed the biggest opportunity of the three – the seamless “network” that so gracefully linked all these tiny computers together for easy file sharing and email-prototype messaging and editing of each other’s designs. If Jobs had “borrowed” that idea (of networking) he would have quickly (in two decades) become the world’s first official trillionaire and the world’s richest person, many times over. But he did not, so let’s go with the two ideas that he did steal – the mouse and the GUI, both made famous with the introduction of the Apple Macintosh (yeah, I know. The actual name of an apple – clever, and another rip-off of something, albeit just a name). Soon the mouses or mice and their graphical user interface icons became ubiquitous, not so much because of the cool, new Mac, but because Mr. Gates was watching his small, but disturbing competitor closely. Gates put the Microsoft mouse on the map, and he muddied the water by changing a few GUI icons from things like a wristwatch for when the user is waiting for the computer to catch up to an hour-glass (the hour-glass timekeeper is an ancient method of calculating time before cell phones and iPads linked into satellites for that trivial kind of data – about the same time that sundials were telling time in Greece, but only on sunny days. Of the two (hour-glass and sundial), only the hour-glass had a time at night, until “glowing” wristwatches and clock-radios provided the time of night.
Since Apple didn’t like Microsoft for obvious reasons, when Microsoft used the ideas Jobs stole from PARC, Apple promptly filed lawsuits for multiple copyright infringements. Well, the poor, old, analog judge needed to bring in his own technology experts to teach him what he was about to rule on which would set a huge precedent one way or the other. Eventually, the judge found in favor of the defendant, Microsoft. He said roughly that copying ideas and changing them slightly does not constitute copyright infringement – you simply can’t copyright an idea because anyone can have an idea. At this time, Bill Gates was not the world’s richest person, that being one of the topics that started this diatribe and now tome.
Surprisingly, even after Apple and Jobs made gobs of money from the Macintosh or simply the Mac, PARC courteously never sued Apple, although if any of the three companies deserved copyrights for ideas, it was PARC. PARC never even utilized its own ideas on its photocopier products until way after the copyright infringement debacle had passed. And even then it only used GUIs on its touch-screen monitors. (And for crying out loud, why doesn’t Microsoft Word spell-check approve of “touchscreen” without the hyphen?) And no one thought to network all the photocopiers until HP and a few upstart PC companies, along with a few startups, tried to tell the business world that printers should be used instead of copiers. Users should just print originals instead of wasting time photocopying analog originals with the instantaneous degradation in quality. Yes, said the giant HP printer and computer company, simply email digital originals and print the difference (I like that one – buy term and invest the difference). And HP started the Mopy Copy Solutions operation (MCS) and had the audacity to tell users to use Multiple Original Prints (Mopiers instead of copiers) and MOPies instead of copies (please note that lowercase “r” in those two words, that separates copier from copiers and thus, MOPies from MOPiers (the HP printers ). I remember an HP executive explaining the futurist concepts of 3-D printing (not gonna happen, in his lifetime anyway) and liquid paper (not liquid ink, from which several HP inkjet divisions banked big bucks, not to mention the plethora of LaserJet divisions that sold printers and toner. Actually, to be more precise and to borrow a phrase from the razorblade marketing gurus: “We’ll give away the razors (for a nominal fee) and make money selling the replaceable razorblades!” At HP, LaserJet marketing managers proclaimed to upper management and executive (who didn’t grasp marketing concepts because until the HP LaserJet came along in April 1984 (eerily, the same month that Apple introduced the Mac), “We’ll give away the LaserJet printers (for a nominal fee) and make money selling the replaceable toner cartridges!” and the HP inkjet
HP inkjet engineers didn’t like the name LaserJet because while there was a bona fide laser in the printer, there was not one, single jet in the entire printer or cartridge. But then, the HP inkjet engineers didn’t invent the HP LaserJet printer so they didn’t get to name it. HP LaserJet marketing folks liked incorporating the laser technology with being fast, like a jet. And indeed, the HP LaserJet, even at a plodding pace of eight pages per minute (ppm) then raced past the even more plodding dot-matrix and daisywheel printers that printed at mere characters-per-minute (cpm didn’t even have time to catch on as an acronym, and besides, CP/M was a hardly used operating system that passed up the chance for fame and fortune when Gary feared the mighty IBM and it’s silly, but complex non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), forever cementing Microsoft and Bill Gates in their places). The dot-matrix and daisywheel printers and their even slower speeds of 40 characters per second on a dot-matrix printer and break-screeching speed (not breakneck speed) of eight characters per second on a daisywheel printer, were slowly and inexorably crushed by the new laser technology, except for a few dot-matrix printers that were required in old-fashioned, analog companies that would stubbornly and even infamously rather die than give up their beloved carbon-paper paper forms.
Oh, yeah. And the HP inkjet divisions, originally, quietly based in Vancouver, Washington, near the Columbia River that dumps into the Pacific Ocean…
And inkjets certifiably contain jets within the inkjet cartridge – actually, many, many, many inkjet nozzles that spray ink directly on the paper in high-density and high-quality formats. Inkjet technology and process information goes here xxxxx…
In HP LaserJet printers, the laser beam never comes in direct contact with the paper. Only the light-sensitive (photosensitive) drum rolls against the paper as the paper quickly moves past the drum and on to the fusing unit that simultaneously melts, glues, and otherwise fuses (hence the boring, yet functional name of fusing unit) the dry, powdery toner particles to said paper passing on its way to the HP LaserJet printer’s plastic output tray. In my presentations, I used to joke that to get bold print on a laser printer just required the user to increase the intensity of the laser until it burned the bold into the paper and through it, if set too high.
So the Vancouver Division (VCD) settled for HP inkjet printers (and “inkjet” but not HP “InkJet”) is approved by Word’s spell-checker). HP “LaserJet” is trademarked and registered as term but inkjet is just the technology so HP could not trade mark it or register it for HP usage only. And the reason I keep putting HP in front of LaserJet is to maintain the trademark and registration of the term. Xerox lost Xeroxing as a term, and Kleenex-brand tissue almost lost its brand recognition, trademark, and registration by just using the term Kleenex without indicating it is a brand of tissue not the tissue itself. Mountain Bell or one of the big telephone companies lost the Yellow Pages use of the jingle “Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages” and even the symbol of the fingers and a hand in a scissor-shape walking. And I did a Boy Scout skit about the big, yellow fingers that hid under a bridge and ate the mighty knight and the less-than-knightly squire, but not the lowly pageboy who passed by without so much as a scratch and so the moral of the fractured fairy tale was “Let your page do the walking through the Yellow Fingers.”
But the mighty, little inkjet printers printed in color long before the HP LaserJet printers. When the HP LaserJet (Word spell-check approved with the uppercase “L” and “J” only) printers finally got around to printing in color, the HP LaserJet divisions sited the superior unsmearable (I made the word up – not approved spell-check word) melted, dry, powdery, plastic toner to the otherwise somewhat smearability (just made it up, too – not approved by spell-check as a word, but I like even more than smearable) of the inkjet printers. So each printer technology won a few battles, but I think the jury is still out on who actually won the color war.
I tend to personally favor the HP LaserJet (non-plural – in spell-check there appropriately are no LaserJets – the plural is HP LaserJet printers, even though lots of division folks used the shorter LaserJets) color printers for at least two reasons: One, from a strictly biased perspective, I worked at the original HP Boise (BOI) Division, home of the original HP LaserJet printer, eleven months after the HP LaserJet printer was introduced, remember, in April 1984. HP’s Personal Software Division (PSD) hired me on April 29th, 1984, in Santa Clara, California, but BOI paid to move me to Boise to work in Technical Marketing supporting mini-computer-based giant dot-matrix printers. Soon I was in HP LaserJet printer Sales Development, trying to outwit the then monochrome Vancouver Division for sales of HP monochrome printers. Yes, in its heyday, HP divisions bitterly, but courteously, fought each other for printer sales, and books like Theory Z cited HP as a better company because it cannibalized its own sales to make more sales by competing between divisions. And the bloodbath continued with the many spinoffs within each technology. Many years after BOI become many other divisions, I worked for Business LaserJet Division (yes, you guessed it, BLD) and later for Mopy Copy Solutions trying get traction with the MOPier (a big, fairly dumb, HP LaserJet printer that had a bulky digital copier on top of the printer, that doubled as a high-tech scanner for slowly converting those old analog copies into newer, fresher digital originals (another oxymoron) with which we just can’t stand to part. And the MOPier duplexed (printed on automatically printed on both sides of the paper, not a type of conjoined two-house real estate property). And the MOPier had an automatic stapler, a stolen idea from the photocopier companies. So we all slugged it out for market share. And we changed MOPier to Mopier because it was too difficult to hold down the shift key for three keystrokes to maintain the MOP in MOPier. And MOP sounded like something you do to the kitchen floor.
Oh, and reason number two for preferring the LaserJet color over HP inkjet color was the smearing issue. (Number one was my bias because much of my HP career was in HP LaserJet printer divisions. Toner just doesn’t smear – the paper will dissolve before the dry, powder, plastic toner will give way. And additionally, when you smear the HP color or the even the black inkjet ink, you can’t erase the smear with any known eraser – the smear is permanent. The one advantage to HP Color inkjet printers over HP Color LaserJet printers is the lower cost of the previous over, or under, the latter. So for cost purposes we, at our little home tucked away in Eagle, Idaho, just a hop, skip, and a jump (less than three miles from the HP Boise site as the crow flies, but about seven miles as the car drives over to Eagle Road, across both forks of the Boise River which splits just before Eagle, then back east two miles on Chinden Blvd to HP Drive and into the parking lot), maintain an HP Photosmart (not PhotoSmart, although, incidentally, neither one is recognized by the spell-checker anyway) inkjet printer to get brilliant photos, but we also house an HP LaserJet 1320. Both printers, incidentally, print duplex. I have the HP LaserJet printer default set to automatically duplex unless I manually override the driver (at least a two-step process) while the HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer Fax Copier Scanner is set to automatically print on one side only because high-quality photos look best on one-sided photo paper. Only in a cheap document, like the Annual Bill and TerriLu Christmas Newsletter, do I typically print color photos in duplex format. So the HP Photosmart printer default is for simplex (yep, it’s a word, meaning single-sided) printing. With four or five clicks I can change to automatically duplex or even manually duplex where I have to carefully place the single-sided printed sheets of paper back into the input paper tray in the correct direction and with the printed side up because the printer flips the paper over to spray ink on the other side and for good measure, I have to wait until the ink has fully dried on the first side before printing on the other, something the printer automatically does when automatically printing duplex. This faster duplex printing is yet another advantage for the HP LaserJet printer which requires no drying time, but perhaps a little cooling time after a stack of papers have passed through the fusing unit set at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or so for normal paper, but ups the temperature to 600 degrees for cardstock which the HP LaserJet struggles to pull through the printer because of the double S-shaped serpentine-style paper path. The HP Photosmart printer, while inferior in the smear department, has no problem pulling even heavy cardstock and thick photo-quality paper through the less-complex C-shaped paper path. So I’m still not sure who is officially ahead overall, but I still have my employee bias pulling for the HP LaserJet printer over the HP inkjet printer, color or monochrome factors aside.
And somewhere I used to keep the fun, Jeopardy-type tidbits of information, like 400 degrees versus 600 degrees, in my brain. Those two numbers, by the way, are not accurate, although I’m quite absolutely certain that even the thinner printer paper is boiled or maybe broiled or perhaps roasted above 212 degrees which is the boiling point of water. Both temperatures are more precise, like 428 degrees and 645 degrees, but don’t quote me on those either.
Why can my brain recall some details but not others? Well, Google helps on a lot of things. For example, while struggling to dust off the cobwebs in some far recess of my mind, I decided to just Google the obvious question, so entered, “Who left Pepsico to work for Apple Computer Company?” and Google instantly brought up “John Skulley” with multiple reference sites. Since I wasn’t concerned too much about accuracy much beyond the correct spelling of Skulley’s last name, I picked Wikipedia because it’s good enough, and it was near the top anyway, so no scrolling was necessary.
Quick, quiet, and quality. Why only have one or two when you can have all three in one box, and at even quicker, quieter, higher-quality resolution. And why did HP go with the quick-quiet-quality gimmick when it was more potent and more correct to claim the HP LaserJet to be quicker, quieter, and qualityiter, no it’s qualitifier, no it’s qualitynesser, not it’s… Naw, forget it. Let’s just go with quick, quiet, and quality, and we’ll explain the rest of the story in the fine print. (Note that it’s still fine “print” but print lines and boundaries are quickly becoming blurred by liquid-crystal display (LCDs), light-emitting diode (LED) and plasma screen technology, not only on big screen TVs, but also in tiny-screen phones, iPods, and the larger iPads, Kindles, GPS devices (now mostly just included with any smart phone, etc. And notice that we never had dumb phones until someone invented smart phones and advertised them as such.
Kids today don’t even know what carbon-copy paper was let alone what function it provided. Carbon paper was shiny, dark, indigo blue on one side and cloudy blue on the other side. You put the carbon paper between two sheets of regular paper. When you write or type, the blue carbon transfers to the second sheet, thus making a carbon copy, not an original, but it was faster than writing or typing a second original. Carbonless copy paper replaced much of the carbon-copy paper need. And analog photocopiers actually surpassed the technology of carbonless copy paper. Digital photocopiers (actually, an excellent oximoron where the two words don’t belong in the same sentence, let alone side-by-side in that sentence – because a digital photocopy will never be as good as the printed original) and MOPiers tried desperately to dispose of the arcane world of analog copying, but I don’t think either one really did. HP manufactures digital printers that also make digital photocopies (a step down in quality even at 4800×2400 dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution. Meanwhile Xerox, Canon, and a slew of other photocopier manufacturers, still manufacturer now digital photocopiers that also print originals like actual printers. So who is telling whom what anyway? Why print anyway when you can read an e-book or an analog book both from Amazon, but only the e-book is downloadable (also a new word approved of by Microsoft’s spell-checking dictionary).
At this point, I can’t even remember what or whose technology I’m trying to explain.
Only Steve Jobs really had the audacity tell users what to think and do, and then to have the users not only believe his concepts, but also to embrace, cherish, and worship the apps and the devices that made the apps work. Jobs never used “user groups” like IBM, HP, and Microsoft, to name but three techno-giants that used “user groups” and user studies to get a grasp on what customers wanted and needed and the giants could provide. Steve Jobs taught tenaciously that even end-users (a computer-based term) didn’t know what they needed and thus what they wanted or where to go and how to get there. But Jobs knew all along what user’s needed and then he invented technologies and entire industries to build the products that filled those customer needs.
So PARC, by the way, was actually a small research arm of the well-known photocopying company Xerox, headquartered back east in Norwalk, Connecticut (moved from Stamford, Connecticut in October 2007), though its largest population of employees is based in and around Rochester, New York – talk about a technology and industry and company in need of a digital makeover in a hurry! Most people speak of “Xeroxing” (yeah, Microsoft recognizes Xeroxing with the first “X” capitalized as a bona-fide word, but not “xeroxing” with a lowercase “x”) a copy rather than “making” a copy or more precisely “photocopying a copy of the original.”
From Wikipedia, Xerox History: “Xerox was founded in 1906 in Rochester as The Haloid Photographic Company,[6] which originally manufactured photographic paper and equipment. The company subsequently changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958 and then simply Xerox in 1961.[7] Xerography, a modern word meaning “dry writing” developed from two Greek roots, is the name of the process invented in 1938 and developed by Haloid Company. The company came to prominence in 1959 with the introduction of the Xerox 914,[8] the first plain paper photocopier using the process of Electro-photography, (later changed to xerography) discovered by Chester Carlson, which he developed with John H. Dessauer.[9] The 914 was so popular that by the end of 1961, Xerox had almost $60 million in revenue. By 1965, revenues leaped to over $500 million. Before releasing the 914, Xerox had tested the market by introducing a developed version of the prototype Hand equipment, known as the Flat-plate 1385. This was followed by the first automatic xerographic printer, the Copyflo, in 1955. The Copyflo was a large microfilm printer, producing positive prints, on roll paper, from any type of microfilm negative. Following the Copyflo, the process was scaled down to produce the 1824 microfilm printer. At about half the size and weight this, still sizable, machine printed onto hand fed, cut sheet paper which was pulled through the process by one of two gripper bars. This gripper feed system, when scaled down, was to become the basis for the 813 desktop copier. In 1963, Xerox introduced the Xerox 813, the first desktop plain-paper copier, bringing Carlson’s vision of a copier that could fit on anyone’s office desk into a reality. Ten years later in 1973, a basic, analogue (hey, notice the awkward original (or maybe photocopy, in this case of analogue instead of analog) spelling , color copier, based on the 914, followed. The 914 itself was gradually sped up to become the 420 and 720. The 813 was similarly developed into the 330 and 660 products and, eventually, also the 740 desktop microfiche printer. Chester Carlson’s original hand equipment, which saw the market as the 1385 Flatplate, was not actually a viable copier because of its speed of operation. In consequence it was sold as a platemaker to the offset lithography market. It was little more than a high quality, commercially available plate camera, mounted as a horizontal rostrum camera, complete with photo-flood lighting and timer. The glass film/plate, however, had been replaced with an aluminum plate, coated in selenium. Clever electrics turned this into a quick developing and reusable substitute for film. A skilled user could produce fast, paper and metal printing plates of a higher quality than almost any other method. Having started as a supplier to the offset litho. duplicating industry, Xerox now set its sights on capturing some of offset’s market share. Xerox’s first foray into duplicating, as distinct from copying, was with the Xerox 2400. This number denoted the number of prints produced in an hour. Although still some way short of offset speeds, this machine introduced the industry’s first Automatic Document Feeder, Slitter/Perforator and Collator (sorter). This product was soon sped up, fifty percent, to become the Xerox 3600 Duplicator. As an aside, whilst all the above was going on, in a small lab a team was borrowing copiers, off the line, and modifying them. Called the Long Distance Xerography project (LDX for short) and beginning with 914s, the aim was to be able to connect two copiers together, via the public telephone network, such that a document scanned on one machine would be copied out on the other. Many years later this work came to fruition in the Xerox Telecopiers, seminal to today’s fax machines. The fax operation in today’s multifunction copiers is true to Carlson’s original vision for these devices. The company expanded substantially throughout the 1960s, making millionaires of some long-suffering investors who had nursed the company through the slow research and development phase of the product. In 1960, the Wilson Center for Research and Technology was opened in Webster, New York, a research facility for xerography. Then in 1961, the company changed its name to Xerox Corporation. Xerox common stock (XRX) was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1961 and on the Chicago Stock Exchange in 1990. In 1969, Xerox acquired Scientific Data Systems [SDS], and produced the Sigma line of 32-bit mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s. The laser printer was invented in 1969 by Xerox researcher Gary Starkweather by modifying a Xerox copier. This development resulted in the first commercially available laser printer, the Xerox 9700, being launched in 1977. Laser printing eventually became a multibillion dollar business for Xerox. Archie McCardell was named president of the company in 1971.[10] During his tenure, Xerox introduced the Xerox 6500, its first color copier.[11] During McCardell’s reign at Xerox, the company announced record revenues, earnings and profits in 1973, 1974, and 1975.[12] John Carrol became a backer, later spreading the company throughout North America. Following these years of record profits, in 1975 Xerox resolved an anti-trust suit with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which at the time was under the direction of Frederic M. Scherer. The Xerox consent decree resulted in the forced licensing of the company’s entire patent portfolio, mainly to Japanese competitors. Within four years of the consent decree, Xerox’s share of the U.S. copier market dropped from nearly 100% to less than 14%.
In 1970, under company president Charles Peter McColough, Xerox opened the Xerox PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) research facility. The facility developed many modern computing technologies such as the graphical user interface (GUI), Laser printing, WYSIWYG text editors and Ethernet. From these inventions, Xerox PARC created the Xerox Alto in 1973, a small minicomputer similar to a modern workstation or personal computer. This machine can be considered the first true Personal Computer, given its versatile combination of a cathode-ray-type screen, mouse-type pointing device, and a QWERTY-type alphanumeric keyboard. But the Alto was never commercially sold, as Xerox itself could not see the sales potential of it. It was, however, installed in Xerox’s own offices, worldwide and those of the US Government and military, who could see the potential. Within these sites the individual workstations were connected together by Xerox’s own unique LAN, The Ethernet. Data was sent around this system of heavy, yellow, low loss coaxial cable using the packet data system. In addition, PARC also developed one of the earliest internetworking protocol suites, the PARC Universal Packet. In 1979, Steve Jobs made a deal with Xerox’s venture capital division: He would let them invest $1 million in exchange for a look at the technology they were working on. Jobs and the others saw the commercial potential of the WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, and Pointing device) system and redirected development of the Apple Lisa to incorporate these technologies. Jobs is quoted as saying, “They just had no idea what they had.” In 1980, Jobs invited several key PARC researchers to join his company so that they could fully develop and implement their ideas.
The Xerox Alto workstation was developed at Xerox PARC (almost as clumsy as HP’s first Mopier product (I instinctively typed “our” instead of “HP’s” because for twenty years HP was my career, but not my life – old habits die young. You can get me out of HP, but you can’t get the HP out of me).
In 1981 Xerox released a system similar to the Alto, the Xerox 8010 Star. It was the first commercial system to incorporate technologies that have subsequently become commonplace in personal computers, such as a bitmapped display, window-based GUI, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail. The Xerox 6085 Star, despite its technological breakthroughs, did not sell well due to its high price, costing $16,000 per unit. A typical Xerox Star-based office, complete with network and printers, would have cost $100,000. In the mid 1980s, Apple considered buying Xerox; however, a deal was never reached. Apple instead bought rights to the Alto GUI and adapted it into to a more affordable personal computer, aimed towards the business and education markets. The Apple Macintosh was released in 1984, and was the first personal computer to popularize the GUI and mouse amongst the public. The [Xerox] company was revived in the 1980s and 1990s, through improvement in quality design and realignment of its product line. Development of digital photocopiers in the 1990s and a revamp of the entire product range—essentially high-end laser printers with attached scanners, known as Multi Function Machines, or just MFMs, these were able to be attached to computer networks—again gave Xerox a technical lead over its competitors. Xerox worked to turn its product into a service, providing a complete document service to companies including supply, maintenance, configuration, and user support. To reinforce this image, the company introduced a corporate signature, “The Document Company” above its main logo and introduced a red digital X. The digital X symbolized the transition of documents between the paper and digital worlds. In 2000, Xerox acquired Tektronix color printing and imaging division in Wilsonville, Oregon, for US$925 million. This led to the current Xerox Phaser line of products as well as Xerox solid-ink printing technology. In September 2004, Xerox celebrated the 45th anniversary of the Xerox 914. More than 200,000 units were made around the world between 1959 and 1976, the year production of the 914 was stopped. Today, the 914 is part of American history as an artifact in the Smithsonian Institution. Xerox’s turnaround was largely led by Anne M. Mulcahy, who was appointed president in May 2000, CEO in August 2001 and chairman in January 2002.[13] Mulcahy launched an aggressive turnaround plan that returned Xerox to full-year profitability by the end of 2002, along with decreasing debt, increasing cash, and continuing to invest in research and development.
Notice: There is not even one courtesy reference to HP, no worries, and hardly a mention of “printer” with one laser-printer reference, and mostly microfilm printers and microfiche printers and a reference to original copier (an oxymoron) and Telecopiers (an oxymoron – sorry, but Teledevices are innately digital. The article, lifted in part, no doubt, from the Xerox.com website which, by the way, is digital, even had the audacity to use the term “multifunction copier” (another oxymoron). Sorry, but HP coined the terms “multifunction printer” (MFP) and “All-in-One” (AIO), during the late 1990s as the Mopier division was dying, to describe digital printers. Yes, the original Gutenberg press upon which the world’s first document was printed in the way of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, was an analog device. Even offset printers, many of which have gone the way of the dinosaurs, are pretty much digitally rendered today, although still using offset analogly (I just made that word up because I didn’t want to bother using it in grammatically correct way – analogy-technology shortened to analogly). Xerox may have made the first laser printer in 1977 based on a big, clunky photocopier , but HP got the last laugh by inventing the first “desktop” laser printer in Boise, Idaho, research and development. The HP engineer-inventor used the same concept (but this time it wasn’t stealing because it was HP (while I am no longer employed by HP, I’m still fiercely loyal) that Gary Starkweather used to invent the first actual laser printer. Once again, before its time, Xerox had the technology but didn’t exploit it.
From a Google search for “HP LaserJet printer inventor…
EARLY LASER PRINTER DEVELOPMENT
The Early Days
Many people wrongly believe that Hewlett-Packard invented the laser printer. In fact, President George Bush visited the HP printer division in Boise, Idaho in 1990 (we were in Bothell, Washington, at the time) and gave a speech in which he congratulated HP engineers for inventing the laser printer. He told them they were setting an excellent example for how to keep America competitive. At the time of this writing (1994) HP has used Canon engines for all of its laser printer models except for one very early and unsuccessful model, the 2685A, that used a Ricoh engine. In 1993 and 1994 rumors abounded that HP would soon introduce printers entirely manufactured by itself. Perhaps President Bush’s comments had something to do with inspiring such an effort.
Xerox started work on laser printers back in 1969. By 1977 Xerox was selling the 9700 (a 120 page-per-minute, full-duplex monster) for about $350,000. Canon brought out the first desktop laser printer, called the LBP-10 in or around 1982. In 1983 Canon started giving private showings of the LBP-CX to key companies in California such as Apple, Diablo and HP. Canon was looking for strong marketing partners who were in the computer business. Canon U.S.A. was very strong in cameras and office products, copiers for example, but didn’t have the connections needed to sell effectively into the data processing world. Evidently, one of Canon’s first stops was the Diablo Systems subsidiary of Xerox Corporation. Diablo was the logical partner because it had the largest market share for letter-quality daisywheel printers and the marketing managers had recently shown their willingness to put the Diablo name on products from other manufacturers. Diablo had just done several OEM deals with Honeywell for dot matrix printers and with Sharp for color ink jet printers. Canon really wanted Xerox as a partner, and Xerox was the first company offered the opportunity to market the CX engine with Canon’s controller. Xerox declined Canon’s offers, as Xerox was developing what it wrongly believed to be a superior desktop laser printer with Fuji-Xerox in Japan. The Xerox machine became known as the 4045. It was both a copier and a laser printer, weighed about 120 pounds and cost about twice as much to make as the CX, but didn’t have an all-in-one toner cartridge, and the print quality was poor. The HP LaserJet’s smaller size, better print quality and lower cost of operation caused the 4045 to become a 120-pound bomb that dealers couldn’t move without a fork lift. Former Diablo managers recall these early meetings with Canon as one of the many great opportunities Xerox let slip away in the early 1980’s. The HP LaserJet could have been the Xerox LaserJet. The Canon engine was just one of the blockbuster products that Xerox could have combined to become the world’s biggest company in computer-aided design and publishing. The brilliant people at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) invented the ideas of windows, icons, and mice that became the basis for modern computer operating systems. The inventors of PostScript, Ethernet and MS Word all once worked at Xerox. When the people at Diablo declined Canon’s offer, the Canon delegation left Fremont and went West a few miles to see HP in Palo Alto, and South to Apple Computer in Cupertino. Hewlett-Packard was a logical second choice, as HP was one of Diablo’s best customers for daisywheel printers, and had an ever-expanding line of dot matrix and daisywheel printers that it was marketing horizontally to all parts of the computer business. Sales of the HP LaserJet took off like a rocket. When the LaserJet line became the largest dollar-volume product line in HP’s history it really began to change the minds of old timers at HP, who had previously been afflicted by the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome that held all non-HP products in disdain. By late 1985 it was estimated that HP had 83 percent market share in desktop laser printers. Reportedly, HP sold over 500,000 LaserJet, LaserJet Plus, and LaserJet 500 Plus printers before switching over to the SX engine for the LaserJet II in 1987. HP hoped that LaserJet sales would be a foot in the door to expand its computer business systems sales. Many dealers signed up to carry the HP 150 and Vectra line just so they could have access to the incredibly popular LaserJet. Evidently, the selling of HP brand computers is still the easiest path to becoming authorized for HP printer sales.
HP Did (and Still Does) Everything Right
The story of how HP captured the largest market share in laser printers would make a good course for college business students. Basically, HP planned and executed extremely well to get and hold onto the huge market share it has. As time goes on, it is hard to imagine that HP will be able to continue the series of grand slams it has had with nearly every laser printer model introduced. At the time of this writing (1994), it seems HP is still on a roll. The LaserJet 4 seems to be the finest affordable desktop printer to date. Its beautiful print quality and price blow every other manufacturer away. At this time, we predict that the recently introduced 4SI, and the about-to-be-released 4L and 4ML, will be fabulously successful as well. What did HP do that made the original LaserJet so successful? First, HP had the right product for the market of that time (circa 1984-1985). People wanted faster, quieter, daisywheel type printers, with more consistent print quality. They wanted more typefaces, more symbols and characters on a page, and they wanted fonts of different sizes for headlines and footnotes. The largest market segment (business word processing) was not ready for desktop publishing and graphics, but they needed more than could be obtained from a daisywheel printer. Second, PCL was easily adapted to the word processing programs of the day. It was a good half-step between word processing and page processing. The structure of HP PCL is very similar to that of any ASCII printer. The format is basically one of positioning the print-head and placing the character. As each character is placed, the print-head automatically advances to the next position. If the style or the size of the character is to be changed, then an “escape” sequence must be sent before the data is to be printed. Many utilities were created to allow existing software to access the new capabilities of PCL. Unfortunately, most of it was difficult for most users to understand and many people continued to use the LaserJet as if it were a quiet daisywheel printer.
Third, the competition stupidly thought that Diablo 630 emulation was important. Canon decided to keep the Diablo 630 emulation for itself, using it in the Canon brand CX-based printer, the LBP-8A1. Since it had Diablo 630 emulation, Canon wrongly thought it didn’t really need to do much work to get software support, because all major programs already supported the Diablo 630 standard. There were so many people cloning the 630 that Cal Bauer, of Bauer Enterprises, created a healthy business testing printers for full Diablo 630 compatibility. Without significant extensions, Diablo 630 emulation just didn’t give users all the benefits they expected from their new laser printers. HP PCL provided the extensions that Diablo 630 emulation lacked. Fourth, and probably most important to the success of the LaserJet, HP got a lot of good software support for PCL early, before other PDLs had a chance since HP didn’t have Diablo 630 emulation, it was forced to get PCL supported. HP knew the printers wouldn’t sell well without software support, so it generously provided development units to all software companies of any significance. This was the smartest thing that HP did in the early days. It planted the seeds for the HP LaserJet to become the best supported printer ever. Software companies recommended it to their customers and sales were phenomenal. Fifth, HP listened to customers and made corrections as customers requested features and changes. Switching from RS-232 parallel only was one of the many customer-requested changes HP made. Like the HP version of the Diablo 630 (Model 2601A), the original LaserJet 2686A had only an RS-232 interface. The LaserJet interface also supported the faster RS-422, which worked on cables up to about 1,000 feet; but most computers didn’t support RS-422, so its benefits were rarely known to the users. At first, HP engineers probably recommended to management that the RS-232 standard be promoted over parallel on the basis of fewer wires in the cable, lower cabling cost, greater transmission distances and greater noise immunity. But dealers and users hated the RS-232 interface, because most of them didn’t understand how to make it work. Even for those who understood it, RS-232 posed an unwanted hassle. When a customer couldn’t make it work, he’d bring it to the dealer for help. If the dealer didn’t stock the right cable, he’d have to make one. If he made it wrong or didn’t match Baud rates, word length and parity settings properly on the first try, then the dealer would look like an idiot in front of the customer. People also liked to share the expensive LaserJet printer with inexpensive mechanical switch boxes, and the +12 to -12 volt levels of RS-232 signals are more likely to generate high-voltage spikes caused by arcing across the contacts of the switch boxes than the 0 to 5 volt TTL signals of parallel ports. Therefore, HP LaserJet printers (I had to correct the usage of HP LaserJets for fear of HP losing the trademark and registration –see other place in this document about that) using RS-232 needed expensive repairs more often. Eventually, dealers and users insisted on Centronics parallel, because it always worked the first time and seemed more reliable. Just plug in the cable and go. No more fiddling with cabling, break-out boxes, null-modem cables, and tiny dip switches for baud rate, parity, stop bits or handshaking protocols like XON/XOFF and DTR. Because of this, the revised HP LaserJet Plus included more memory and a Centronics parallel interface, which was always on the board design but not implemented. Sixth, HP built a distribution channel that moved product quickly with minimum mark-up. In the early days, it was fairly easy for most small computer dealers to become HP dealers. HP sold the product to the big chains as well, and soon HP LaserJet printers were readily available and almost over-distributed. Dealers complained they weren’t making any money, and HP tried to constrain the channel. Low prices benefited the end users and HP. Dealers didn’t like it, but if they dropped HP, nobody would come to their stores and look at any other type of laser printer.
Back to my rolling commentary…
Don’t get me started on escape sequences for telling a printer what to do. I taught simple-minded sales representatives (I can use “simple-minded sales representatives” as a term because I were one thrice with HP, once at New York Life Insurance Company, once at MicroComputer Systems (also MCS like Mopy Copy Solutions), and once in South Africa. As the sales trainer for Sales Force 12 (SF12) in 1988, I felt even the sales reps could stand to understand a little HP LaserJet printer technology so they could at least sound more intelligent when the occasional technoid customer asked a laser-printer related question. I created two somewhat technical classes for training at the national sales meeting (Laser Printer Technology and HP LaserJet Printing) that coincided with the introduction of the much-anticipated HP LaserJet II printer that had enough internal memory to actually print one full page of 300×300 dots-per-inch graphics with a staggering, mind-boggling, mind-numbing one megabyte or one million bytes or characters internal printer memory. In 2012, the computer industry is way beyond megabytes (one million bytes/characters), with gigabytes (one billion), terabytes (one trillion), petabytes (one thousand trillion or one quadrillion (in 2002, 300 petabyte made up all the computer memory sold worldwide at the enterprise level)), and eventually we will get to exabyte (one million trillion or one quintillion (5 exbytes: all the words spoken by all humans since the dawn of man through 2002 and probably today)), zettabytes (one billion trillion or one sextillion (Carl Sagan’s estimate of the number of grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts and all the sand in the world and 70 billion trillion or 70 sextillion is the estimate of all the stars in all the galaxies in the entire universe – I like hour the stars are so numerous that they outnumber all the grains of sand 70 times over), and eventually yottabytes (one trillion trillion or one septillion – way beyond our wildest imaginations), and eventually more. And the HP LaserJet II had built-in typefaces in various point sizes, although variable (not various) point sizes were not included until the HP LaserJet III printer debuted. And after that we just used standard HP LaserJet 4 printer nomenclature, available in several renditions, and then the LaserJet 5, and even LaserJet 6 printer. Then we just went to HP LaserJet big model numbers like the olden days: HP LaserJet 1320 printer is a very robust number for a printer instead of a flimsy single-digit product number.
I taught the sales reps about escape sequences and how to print a full page 11×8.5-inch, but not legal-sized paper, of high-resolution 300×300 dpi graphics… It now requires 11.5 megabytes to print 4800×2400 dpi at full resolution on a complete 11×8.5-inch paper, and any sales rep worth her salt and that paid attention during my spell-binding, joke-laden sales presentation in 1987 will actually know how to compute the pixel count and the memory requirement.
So why is Pixar Productions spelled with an “a” while pixel, upon which Pixar must be based, is actually spelled with an “e”? Well, just Google that exact question…. Sorry, just asked Google and even Google couldn’t handle the complexity much past Pixar and The Incredibles. So tomorrow, actually today, I’ll have to simplify the question, maybe without the quote marks and some of the verbiage. Maybe just Google “Pixar Productions and pixels”.
With digital originals in the form of documents, photographs, and more, who needs photocopies anyway which are actually degenerations beginning with the first analog copy. Hey, I worked for HP’s startup division, Mopy Copy Solutions (MSC) which was going to put Xerox, Canon, and that notorious slew of photocopier companies neatly out of business, yet some have survived the onslaught as digital photocopier companies (a triple oxymoron in today’s world). I even got a $99 prize for submitting the new operation’s name. It had been quickly dubbed Digital Operating Solutions or DOS which is associated with the antiquated Disc Operating System (DOS) and Quick and Dirty Disk Operating System (QD-DOS) mentioned earlier. So the general manager, Tim Haney, initiated a contest to improve the name of the operation and I submitted about twenty suggestions and won with Mopy Copy Solutions (MCS) and explained earlier.
Steve Wozniak. Finally, let’s consider the ultimate technoid of the 1970s, his Royal Geekness, the honorable, but unknighted, the wonderful and great, Steve “the Woz” Wozniak of Apple Computer, the behind-the-scenes nerd who put the billionaire in “geekiness” (look closely, billionaire with a small “b” is in there somewhere – you to be at least be at $50 million in net worth to qualify for a big “B” as in Bill Gates) while the other Steve (Jobs) hawked the Apple computers. WoZ not only was a take on his surname, but also stood “Wheels of Zeus” with Zeus being the great Greek god of mythology.
Steve Jobs was the genius who changed our world while Steve Wozniak was simply the technical genius behind the shingle that displayed Apple Computer Company and its original logo – an Apple with a bite as a clever form of byte cleverly bitten (bit is one eighth of a typical 8-bit byte) out of the side, and then, the key colors of a rainbow. Today’s Apple symbol is simply monochromatically white or black, depending on the accompanying background contrast color, even though the world is far more colorful than ever, made even more so by the colorful HP color inkjet printer and HP Color LaserJet printers. Hey, in the 1980s and early 1990s we only had monochrome monitors, in green, amber, or white text.
The distinction is between Jobs and Woz is profound – Wozniak was tremendously talented technologist, but great as he was, he was just a computer scientist, with all due respect. He had a cool-sounding name, to boot. However, he did not blend the worlds of computer science and business – Jobs did that probably better than any entrepreneur in history, and for that he his rightfully crowned by TIME as the Genius Who Changed Our World, and not just “the” world but the more specific “Our” World. And thankfully, no one tried saying something like “Jobs did a great job changing the world.” Ha ha ha – ho ho ho – amazingly clever and original and utterly ridiculous.
From Wikipedia, “Origins of Apple: Wozniak met Steve Jobs when fellow Homestead High School student, Bill Fernandez, introduced them to each other. In 1970, they became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.
According to Wozniak’s autobiography, iWoz, Jobs had the idea to sell a computer as a fully assembled printed circuit board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak’s HP scientific calculator and Jobs’ Volkswagen van), raised $1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs’ bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs’ garage (similar to the famous HP-in-a-garage startup). Wozniak’s apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and some computer games Wozniak had developed. By 1971, one year after enrolling, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley and developed the computer that eventually made him famous. By himself he designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I. With the Apple I design, he and Jobs were largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists very interested in computing. The Club was one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over several years. Unlike other Homebrew designs, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that drew a crowd when it was unveiled.
Excerpt from the Apple I design manual, including Wozniak’s hand-drawn diagrams
On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Their first product, the Apple I computer, was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of expansion cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user. The Apple I was priced at $666.66. (Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and “I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits.” It was $500 plus a 1/3 markup, which is actually $666.67, rounding up to the nearest penny.) (Are we really back to “rounding” – really??) Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 50 system boards to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California.
Airplane Crash: In February 1981, Wozniak was injured in a private plane crash taking off from the Santa Cruz Sky Park.[9] The cause of the crash was determined to be premature liftoff.[further explanation needed] He was unable to recall details of the crash and, for many weeks after being released from the hospital, did not realize he had been in a crash at all. He says he wandered around in a haze and did not report to work, thinking every day was a weekend day. He did not remember one day to the next, and needed to be told how to get to places familiar to him. After questioning his wife,[citation needed] he finally began to figure out what had happened, after which his memory began operating correctly again. Employment with Apple:
Steve Wozniak in 1983
Wozniak did not immediately return to Apple after having recovered from the crash. Instead, he married Candice Clark and returned to UC Berkeley under the name “Rocky Clark” (Rocky Raccoon was his dog’s name and Clark his wife’s maiden name), finally earning his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering & computer sciences (EECS) in 1986.[10] In May 1982 and 1983, Wozniak also sponsored two US Festivals to celebrate evolving technologies; they ended up as a technology exposition and a rock festival as a combination of music, computers, television and people.
In 1983 he returned to Apple product development, desiring no more of a role than that of an engineer and a motivational factor for the Apple workforce.[8]
Wozniak permanently ended his full-time employment with Apple on February 6, 1987, 12 years after having created the company. He still remains an employee and receives a small token paycheck, est. to be roughly 120k per year.[8][11][12] He is also an Apple shareholder.[13] He also maintained connections with Steve Jobs until Jobs’ death in October 2011,[14] although in 2006 Wozniak stated that he and Jobs were not close friends.
Post-Apple career
Wozniak founded a new venture called CL 9, which developed and brought the first programmable universal remote control to market in 1987.[8] He says he “did a degree under an assumed name — Rocky Racoon Clark”.[16] Wozniak also taught fifth-grade students.
In 2001, Wozniak founded Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), to create wireless GPS technology to “help everyday people find everyday things. much easily” In 2002, he joined the Board of Directors of Ripcord Networks, Inc., joining Ellen Hancock, Gil Amelio, Mike Connor, and Wheels of Zeus co-founder Alex Fielding, all Apple alumni, in a new telecommunications venture. Later the same year he joined the Board of Directors of Danger, Inc., the maker of the Hip Top (a.k.a. Side Kick from T-Mobile).
In 2006, Wheels of Zeus was closed, and Wozniak founded Acquicor Technology, a holding company for acquiring technology companies and developing them, with Apple alumni Ellen Hancock and Gil Amelio.
In September 2006, Wozniak published his autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. It was co-authored by writer Gina Smith.
In March 2006, Wozniak attended the FIRST National Competition in Atlanta to show off Lego robots.[17] In 2010, he attended another FIRST event, a regional event in downtown Phoenix Arizona at the Arizona State Fairgrounds. In 2012, he attended and was a judge at another FIRST event, the FRC Las Vegas Regional.
In February 2009, Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-io, a data storage and server company, in Salt Lake City, Utah as their chief scientist. On November 18, 2010, Steve Wozniak gave a speech at the Science & Technology Summit at the World Forum Convention Center in The Hague in which he predicted that Android would be dominant over the iPhone market-wise but the iPhone would retain the quality edge.[19]
On June 9, 2011, Wozniak joined members of Fusion-io’s management team to celebrate the company’s first day of trading on the NYSE by ringing The Opening Bell.[20]
On October 20, 2011, Wozniak delivered a keynote presentation entitled “Today’s Science Fiction, Tomorrow’s Science Fact” at IP EXPO, a Computer expo which takes place at Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London.[21]
On November 14, 2011, Steve Wozniak was the keynote speaker at “Rutgers Entrepreneurship Day” at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Steve Wozniak’s Honorary Doctor of Engineering degrees:
- University of Colorado at Boulder — 1989
- Kettering University — 2005
- North Carolina State University — 2005
- Nova Southeastern University — 2005
- ESPOL University in Ecuador — 2008
- Michigan State University — 2011
- Concordia University in Montreal Canada — June 22, 2011
- State Engineering University of Armenia — November 11, 2011
So Steve Wozniak had the certified credentials of a true computer engineer and programmer, unlike co-found Steve Jobs, and Microsoft’s co-founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. But near tragedies put the two “lesser” co-founders out of commission, with a heart attack for Paul Allen and a plane crash for Steve Wozniak. But Steve Wozniak truly left his individual, indelible mark on the computer industry, on the technical side, while the sales counter-parts pitched products.
And I heard from my twenty years at HP that Steve Jobs presented his computer as a fully-assembled printed circuit board idea to his summer manager at HP who scoffed at even the thought of such a rudimentary computer. Another botched decision by nonfunctional manager (HP used the title “functional manager” for those individuals who reported directly to the general manager of a division, and, of course, functional manager is an oxymoron like “postal worker” or “government worker”.
Now, that only scratches a few revolutionized surfaces, and a few empire builders, entrepreneurs, moguls, and otherwise ultra-rich magnates, but let’s get back to understanding computer science AND accounting/business combined. Well, after all that, I think we do understand the combination, at least a little.
Now, add visionary to the mix and you too, just might become rich beyond being able to count your wealth except in rough guesstimates (accepted by Word’s spell-checker).
Small Talk with Bill Ross 