Author Archive

Farallon DiskPaper

317 words

3K on disk

October 1990

Farallon DiskPaper

In the Fall of 1990 journalists started mentioning a new product from Farallon. That corporation, a commercial spin-off of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG), successfully marketed products such as the PhoneNET LocalTalk cabling system and the MacRecorder/SoundEdit microphone system. Their new idea was a “print to disk” utility — the precursor to the ubiquitous PDF standard which Adobe would usher in 1993 with Acrobat. It was called DiskPaper, and it never shipped.

[…]

DiskPaper had a kind of ghostly presence throughout 1991, hitting mail-order software catalogs with a listed price of $88, and even garnered a mention in a March issue of MacUser looking forward to that year’s Eddy Award contenders. Other previews put the list price at $149. Key features that most remarked upon inclued the ability to save documents as self-launching applications — a different model than the free Reader solution that Adobe would eventually settle on — and the notion that files kept their color and fonts intact when distributed.

By the middle of 1993, the market had heated up again with the Acrobat marketing juggernaut. Adobe was promising to do for the screen what PostScript had done for the printed page: provide a universal format for the digital exchange of files authored in different programs and disparate platforms. Competitors knew that they had to get their similar products out immediately, or be swamped by the Adobe juggernaut. No Hands Software [location] had by this time acquired the rights to the underlying “DigitalPaper” technology from Farallon, and released it for the Macintosh as “Common Ground”. (Windows support was promised as well, together with a software viewer for the Newton.)

In place of the Chooser-level PDFWriter, Common Ground offered “CG Maker” as a printer driver for the direct export of files to the new format. Users could choose to password-protect the resulting file, or (synergy alert!) attach a voice annotation to it via MacRecorder.

ScuzzyGraph II

3 words

0K on disk

August 1989

ScuzzyGraph II

Color Board

Scuzzygraph II

Macworld Expo 1989 Boston

118 words

1K on disk

August 1989

Macworld Expo 1989 Boston

expo

Dates: August 10 – 22, 1989
Exhibitors: 400
Locations: Bayside Exposition Center, World Trade Center, Wang Center
Attendees:

Keynotes

Day 1 – John Sculley (Chairman & CEO, Apple)
Day 1 – Ed Birss (VP of Product Engineering, Apple): Dazzling the Future: CPU’s, Peripherals, Multimedia, and Advanced Technology
Day 2 – Jean-Louis Gassée (President of Products, Apple): Enjoy Reality
Day 2 – Randy Battat (VP of Product Marketing, Apple): The State of the Mac & Beyond: System Software
Day 3 – Alan Kay (Senior Fellow, Apple): From Actions to Agents
Day 3 – Don Casey (VP of Networking & Communications Products, Apple): What’s Ahead and Under the Hood: Networking & Communications

Themes

Hardware

Word Processing

Networking

Graphics

Wrap-Up

MacWorld Expo Washington 1989

26 words

0K on disk

April 1989

MacWorld Expo Washington 1989

expo

Dates

April 26-28,1989

Venue

Washington DC Convention Center

This was the first (and only?) MacWorld held in Washington DC, advertised in the 1988 Boston expo program.