And do William Morris and his contemporaries get no credit for conceiving a
few nice fonts here and there??

jp

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Wirt Atmar
Sent: Thursday, 4 August 2005 3:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] [OT] Steve Jobs & Caligraphy

William asks:

> Anyway while he liked most of the speech he thought that the idea that PCs
>  and Macs have so much variety in fonts is because of Job's Calligraphy
class
>  was absurd - computers would have had it anyway -
>
>  He also said that Jobs got so many of his GUI ideas from Xerox in Palo
>  Alto - and the Mac and Lisa were originally going to be text based
systems.
>
>  I do believe Steve is given a bit too much credit for originality with
the
>  GUI and believe that should go to Xerox -
>
>  But he did bring it to market...What do you all think?

I read Jobs' speech too, and that bit on calligraphy stuck in my craw as
well. It was a highly condensed version of history and came across as
assuming far
too much credit.

At the recent Apple World Wide Developer's Conference, 2005, an executive
from Adobe said that "without Apple, there never would have been an Adobe."
That's true in one sense, but only that the sense that Apple's
Lisa/Macintosh was
the vehicle that Adobe rode to success.

Prior to the development of Lisa, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak visited
Xerox's PARC labs. There they saw the windows, icon, mouse, pointer idiom
that Doug
Englebart had developed, and on which Xerox never capitalized. When they
left
the building, the Steves started high-fiving, hip-whacking, belly-banging
each
other. They now knew what the Lisa/Macintosh was going to be like. And it
was
going to be "insanely great."

But it was John Warnock and Charles Geschke who should be most credited with
the calligraphic-quality of print today, yet even what they did was only a
derivative of a great deal of previous work done in commercial printing in
the
twenty years prior.

Perhaps the person most important in this story is Pierre Bezier of the
Renault Car Company, an engineer-mathematician who made popular the coupled
cubic
equations now known as Bezier curves. Without this bit of mathematics,
PostScript typography (scalable fonts) would have been enormously more
difficult and
perhaps never fully realized.

But even Bezier wasn't the original source of the necessary idea. He
modified
and greatly popularized Bernstein's polynomials, who first published his
ideas in 1912. See, e.g.:

     http://math.fullerton.edu/mathews/n2003/BezierCurveMod.html
     http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BernsteinPolynomial.html

So while Steve Jobs' calligraphy class may have had a significant impact on
him, all it did was sensitize him to the value that these half-century-old
ideas had.

Wirt Atmar

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