Adobe was not born with Photoshop. It started by solving a huge and inconspicuous problem: printing well

Before becoming one of those companies that we almost automatically associate with digital creativity, Adobe had a much more specific and less brilliant obsession at first glance: printing. We are not talking about retouching photographs, editing videos or opening PDF documents with the naturalness with which we do it today, but rather about attacking a difficulty that is basic in appearance and enormous in practice. In the early years of personal computing, making what was seen or designed on a computer turned out well on paper It was not something guaranteed. Adobe’s story begins precisely at that point: with PostScripta language intended to describe how a printed page should look.

The difficulty was that that chain was much more fragile than we can imagine today. Lemelson-MIT remembers that, at that time, personal computers were beginning to hit the market and the printers available were, in many cases, dot matrix, with very low quality results. For truly professional work, the alternative was composition equipment that could cost more than $150,000 at that time and required laborious processes. Between one extreme and the other there was an obvious gap: there was a lack of a more flexible, reliable and accessible way to bring complex pages to paper.

The problem was not creating images, it was getting them to look the same on paper

The next piece of history appears in the famous Xerox PARCwhere laser printing was already a laboratory reality, although still full of limits. Those early machines were controlled by Press, a protocol that worked well with simple letters and images, but got bogged down with demanding projects. A member of that team named John Warnock encountered the same message over and over again, “Too complex page“, and that was no small anecdote. His response was to think of an architecture capable of doing just the opposite: printing any page.

That idea didn’t come from nowhere. Before coming to Xerox, Warnock had worked at Evans & Sutherland, where he was involved in a highly ambitious project for the New York Maritime Academy: a simulator of New York Harbor with computer-generated buildings, docks, buoys, changing weather and other ships. That system had to be built without yet knowing what specific hardware it would end up running on, so the team opted to create a language not tied to a specific machine. A decisive lesson emerged from this: device-independent software gave much more flexibility.

John Warnock, left, and Charles Geschke, right, founders of Adobe

With that learning behind him, Warnock once again encountered a similar problem at Xerox, but now fully applied to printing. The company used different schemes depending on the printer, to the point that its Star stations were under increasing load due to having to communicate with each model in a different way. Warnock and a group led by Charles Geschke They then worked at Interpressa standard, device-independent language for Xerox laser printers. The advance existed, but it collided with a business decision: Xerox adopted it internally and did not want to open it to the market.

Apple LaserWriter

The departure came in 1982, when Warnock and Geschke left Xerox PARC and founded Adobe. Lemelson-MIT says that its first idea was not exactly to become the software company that would end up marking desktop publishing, but rather to set up a printing service for companies and consumers. That plan changed when their financial advisors encouraged them to move toward software development. There PostScript began to take its decisive form: not as a closed solution for a single machine, but as a portable language that manufacturers could integrate into their own devices.

One of the decisive pieces for that technology to jump from the laboratory to the market appeared in Apple. IEEE Spectrum explains that Steve Jobs had a very specific problem: The Macintosh was advancing, but without a quality printer it was difficult to enter the business world. Daisy printers didn’t work for Mac graphics and Apple didn’t arrive in time with a high-quality solution of its own. Adobe was building an answer. In late 1983, Adobe signed an agreement with Apple, and in January 1985, PostScript appeared for the first time on the Internet. LaserWriter.

Seen from today, the interesting thing is that Adobe did not start with the most recognizable part of its current history, but with a layer that we almost always take for granted. Of course, Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop and Premiere are part of a later expansion, but the starting point was different: PostScript and the promise that text, images and graphics could reach paper with fidelity. There was the true initial intuition. Before becoming recognizable for its creative tools, Adobe found its place by solving a discreet but decisive task: that what was created could be printed well.

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