The Adobe Story, Part One

In this case, we're talking about the company Adobe. Yes, we Uh, we've had people ask us about specific Adobe products in the past, or products that used to be owned by somebody else who that are now owned by Adobe. And uh, we were talking about what we wanted to do this week, and I think we wanted to. We

decided that we were going to try this adventure. And it is an adventure because there's a lot going on for a company that's that's not as old as some of the others we've talked about, like IBM, for example, HP General at Trick. You know these companies that have century long histories. In this case, we're talking about a company that was that was originally founded in nine two.

But before we get to that, First of all, we should probably mention if you're not familiar with Adobe overall, really what their focus was early early on, It was all about, uh, the digital information you see on a display, how do you replicate that reliably into things like a

hard copy format? You know, things like if you have a certain font showing up on the screen, how can you create some software that will allow you to make that font translate over into say a hard copy form like on a printer, Or just how you create new types of fonts so that you aren't limited to a single set of characters when you are creating documents for the digital formats, because I mean, you don't want everything

to look exactly the same in uniformly. You want to personalize stuff as much as you can and customize it. So that was really what the Adobe founders were thinking about. Those founders were John Warnock and Charles Gesh. That's right. Um. As a matter of fact, this this whole thing, um, you may be thinking of as sort of a a PC type thing. I mean, Um, the technology we're talking about here led to the popularity of desktop publishing, but the the seeds of this technology were planted quite a

bit before. Um, PCs ended up on every desktop in you know, the corporate world and on on our uh laptops at home and all the other stuff. Um. It really started in in the late nineties seventies at a completely different company that that you probably have heard of before, with the next at the beginning and the next at the end, Xerox. UM. Xerox was known for being a technological leader, but they liked to keep their technologies to themselves.

And we we've talked in the past about Apple, they're they're quote unquote famous for having their their graphical user interface, the Gooey stolen quote unquote allegedly from Zerox from Xerox in their Palo Alto Research center by by uh well actually various people who came in to see it, and among those being Steve Jobs. I know there were others

from other companies. Well, I mean Steve Jobs has you know he was famous for saying at one point during an interview that you know, good artists copy great art steel and this was sort of kind of part of what he was talking about, you know, the graphic user interface and even the mouse. Where technologies developed at this Palo Alto research center or park. That's the Xerox Park.

It's it's a famous, famous research center because so many different technologies that we use today got their start in this research center, and UH, either through licensing or outright theft, have finally made their way to the general public. WHOA, whoa, WHOA. Hold on a minute there, Jonathan. Okay, So when I said that, I was really not thinking clearly. Xerox Park did refine and helped popularize things like the computer mouse and the graphic user interface, but in fact those were

not invented at Xerox Park. A man by the name of Douglas Ingelbart first got those those concepts moving in the early sixties, and it would be a decade later when Xerox would really take advantage of them. So I just wanted to correct that before all of you send all your emails. Ever, Yeah, it's it's um, it's kind of interesting. We should we should eventually do an episode on on this group of people, because feeling would be

at least two. But yes, I agree, But because they came up with so much and and that's in fact how Warnock and Gesh met they were working on UH technologies that would I would work with both bitmapped graphics and uh well graphics and fonts together. UM. Two of these these technologies were called JAM, which is capital J a capital M and interpress UM and Xerox actually decided they were going to use uh interpress as their own standard,

but they refused to license it to other people. And well, you know, they was they were holding it close to their vest if you will pardon the gaming um symbolism there, Yeah, they were. They were really they wanted to keep it to themselves. And and both GESHK and WARNOCKX saw that something like this could could really help other people, and they decided to uh to make a go of it. Yeah, So in nineteen two they go and found Adobe system Well then it was just Adobe. So they found a

company called Adobe. They secured two and a half million dollars in seed money from hembrecton Quist. So they get this money that to found the company. Uh. And it was you saw where it was named what it was named after? Adobe? It was named after a creek that ran through warnox backyard in Los Altos, California. They had at that time, they had no physical office space in two What they did have were two employees, just Warnock and ges and zero dollars in revenue. Uh and uh

Warnox wife Marva designed the first Adobe logo. Now that is not the same logo that Adobe uses today. They've actually revised that logo a couple of times. And I'm sure we'll mention it as it happens when we work our way through the timeline. But yes, it was John Warnock wife who designed the very first one. And um

so wait wait she was a designer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it turns out, you know, well, what the whole company was about originally original was how to reproduce, how to accurately reproduce if I can splin infinitive, uh, the uh, the digital text and graphics you would see on the

screen onto paper. That was the original focus of this company. Now, since then, it has diversified quite a bit, although not as not as much as some other companies you can think of, Like there are technology companies out there that have diversified so much that there are if you were to look at two different branches of that company, it would be very hard to draw any similarities between the two.

Like we we've talked about some of these companies that got so big and so complex that you know, it was almost like you're talking about completely different companies when you're talking about different divisions that that's not exactly true with Adobe. You mean like like ge makes, you know, toaster ovens and jet engines. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good example. Um and medical technology and guest top printers. Yeah. I mean it's it's yeah, They're They're versification has been

more uh sort of, I don't know how. It's sort of like the product lines you see in the store, like, oh, well, you know, we've we've always made chocolate and vanilla flavors, but now we're making mango. Yeah. Uh. Their their their technologies are very much in the design world, right. So then they started to develop a programming language. Technically it's a dynamically typed concatinative. Because I can't say these words

programming language. I can say concatenation, concatenitive, concatenitive. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it. Yeah? Yeah, I'm like I look at them like I have never seen this word before, and I'm just going to ruin it. Anyway. It's a programming language called PostScript, and this sort of forms the foundation for the products that Adobe would develop over its early early years as a company. So that all happens in a D two and in eight three they officially incorporate in

the state of California. So Adobe becomes an official company and they issue their first PostScript license. They also opened their first office space in Mountain View, California, which, for those of you who are familiar with the technology region in California, that's Google's stomping ground these days, a lot of people stomping ground. Frankly, yeah, well Google stomps bigger

than most companies. Uh. And and so they the first license for PostScript technology goes to another notable company in the technology world, another notable company in the technology work world that has a name that begins with a letter A. As a matter of fact, Apple, that is correct, Apples the first license of PostScript technology to help to determine these the displays fonts and things of that nature on

Apple computers. Uh. During that year, So this is technically the second year of Adobe, but the first year of incorporation. The company makes eighty three thousand dollars in revenue and they have thirteen employees. So the sky is the limit. Oh yeah, absolutely, Well, um, if you'll remember, we've talked about, you know, of course Steve Jobs many times, but he he had done some design work back when he was

studying in college. He was fascinated with typography, and one of the things that he really wanted for the Macintosh computer, which if you will remember, launched in UM, was its ability to handle fonts. Well, that's thanks in large part to Adobe's PostScript technology. Hey, I didn't trip to trip over that word. I tripped over trip. Yeah, well we're

none of us are perfect, but yeah, it's uh. This start started a close relationship between Apple and Adobe, which which has not always been a smooth relationship, even even when even in these early days, because Adobe was sort of, for a while the only game in town when it came to font technology and font development, and so they could kind of depending upon whom you asked. If you asked Apple, Apple would say their prices are getting too high. You know, we're having to pay uh licensing fees that

are unreasonably high. And we'll get more into that as that relationship develops. But in four this is when, ah, that just really starts to come into play because Adobe enters into a licensing agreement to develop Type one versions

of linotype fonts. And this is sort of the basis of this this font war between Adobe and Apple, which sounds like it's, you know, kind of boring, but it's really interesting to me because you're talking about something that's fundamental to the way that a computer displays information to a user. So it is something that's really really important. And if you know, if you do have essentially what if what if in effect is a monopoly on that,

then you hold a lot of power. You know, it doesn't seem like it would be much like it's the font what what? What's the big deal? No? No, no, no, no, no, no, no no. Let let me tell you just as a personal anecdote, because you know, eighty four, I was, you know, twelve, thirteen years old, um and uh you know, my my older brother and if he wanted to do to uh type up a paper for class, he got over to

the typewriter and typed it. And if you wanted fonts, you know what, back when we talked about IBM, we had a selectric typewriter at home. If you wanted to change the funt, you had to change the ball on the typewriter. And there those were not super cheap. We only had I think maybe two um and they looked like you had typed it, you know, and if you make a mistake, you know, white out or go back

over it or type it again. So, uh, my friend, I have a friend who who got one of the very first Macintosh is and uh we took great delight on and typing all the stuff out and all the different fonts and printing it out, and it was like, wow, that's really I mean, that's just so cool. I had a printer for my Amiga that I got around the same time that had no dessenders um. And for those of you who are font people, you know what I'm

talking about. But the G s in this case, uh, the lower case G with the thing that hangs below the line the baseline of the font um. The G was hyped up so that the bottom of the little tail on the G was as low as let's say the bottom of a B or an H. So it looked all wonky. I got I got marked off for

that in class. But the way the way this was done brought just made all this this technology more readily available for a lot less than you would find it if you wanted something like that pub lished you would have to pay a lot of money for it, and it was it was a lot of money, but not at the same level that you would have if you had it done professionally. So making these fonts available, that the line of type fonts UM or the I T C fonts, the International UM is it Typography Foundation something

like that. Let me, I'll look for that in a second while you're talking. But yeah, UM, because I know, I just thought here a second to get where it was it UM. But yeah, the I T C fonts were you know, those were available to people who were professionals, and now all of a sudden, you know, making them available to people with the desktop computer for maybe you know,

two or three thousand dollars. Yeah, you're talking about the birth of desktop publishing, which you know suddenly it's it's hard to kind of put this into perspective today, but you imagine that if you go back far enough, publishing something was beyond the means of the average person because they just didn't have access to the sort of type setting equipment they would need to to create layout and

and and produce things on their own. So without going to some other company and hiring them to do it, it was really difficult to do, and this was suddenly creating the ability for the average person to get into

that and that was a very powerful thing. In fact, that was one of the one of the main reasons why personal computers were really taking off, because not only were they being thought of as as an educational tool for kids or a gaming device depending on how you were looking at it, right, it also became a true workstation for people who were into this this publishing arena.

And that same year they relocated their office to Palo Alto, which is stomping grounds for this weekend tech um as well as other companies, and their revenues hit two point two million dollars and sixty eight percent of that revenue came from Apple royalty payments, so Apple royalty payments for the PostScript licenses are made up more than half of that two point two million dollars in revenue. And at

that point they had twenty seven employees. So moving up to UH eighty five, that's when Adobe actually ships PostScript level one, so this is beyond the licensing, they're shipping it as a product. And they also did the first PostScript printer. Yes, go ahead, So I is the International Typeface Corporation, and I apologize it. I had it in the back of my head and then I switched pages on my notes. It's it's easy for me to get those acronyms and and and abbreviations all mixed up to

But yeah, so still early days. But so in eighty four they made two point two million. In eighty five they made four point six millions, so they more than doubled their revenue. They went from twenty seven employees to forty four employees, so they didn't quite double their workforce, but they did double their revenue. And they began to publish the PostScript Language Reference Manual, which is also known

as the Red Book. And if you take a look at that first publication, that first edition, you'll know why it's called the Red Book. It's enormous and it's read, so it's a book. Is also a book. So there we have the mystery solved. Why it is called the Red Book. Is big, it is a book, it is read.

I can't help it. And so in so four years after they've first founded this company, and three years after they incorporated, they launched their initial public offering or i p O. So this is where Adobe switches over from being a privately owned company to a public company, publicly traded company, and their opening stock price at that time

is eleven dollars a share. UH. Since they went public, they have had that stock split several times, so they've done two for one splits on multiple occasions, so which means that you know, they've uh the the value of the company has gone up as they have actually doubled the number of stocks that were available. UH. At the current stock price is, as as of the recording of this podcast, which is at the end of October two thousand and twelve, and this is pre trading dollars here,

thirty three dollars forty cents a share. So you figure the stock has multiplied several times since they launched, and the price itself has gone up. So the value of the company has increased UH dramatically since they went public, which you would hope, right it's to say otherwise is what we call a bad thing. Anyway, they also had their font library hit over one hundred fonts at this time.

Now since then we're talking about fonts that are there are thousands of them, but that was big news back in six Well, that's an understatement, but still but I'm talking about the Adobe font library in particular, and that's when. That's also when another thing with Apple happened, although it was not particularly about the licensing. It was a fellow

who came from Apple. He was a developer on a computer called the Leasa Lisa, which we talked about I think a couple of times in this podcast in other episodes. But the Lisa computer was not what you would call a success. But Tom malloy, who worked at Apple, joined Adobe and began to design typeface and PostScript products and would climb quite high in the executive branch of Adobe.

Um So that was an interesting development, I thought. Moving on to D seven, do you have anything to say about six Adobe publishes One of their flagship products in the early days anyway, illustrator let it let let people create PostScript based graphics. Now, essentially PostScript graphics are line art. So when if you've heard our our episode where we talked about the different types of graphics computer graphics, line art is has some advantages over bitmapped art in the

specifically when it comes to scaling. So when you change the scale of line art, you don't have to worry about problems with resolution. No, not generally, because vector graphics basically that the computer can interpolate, uh you know, the starting and ending points of each of the lines and the line art. It's all based on math. Yeah, so you know, math is what computers compute. Really all it all it takes is for it to do that. Now, if you're uh, drinking a bitmapped graphic, it's not such

a problem. The computer just makes uh, you know, a decision on which of the pixels it needs to toss outing it because because of bitmapped image do so well is a collection of pixels, right, So you're think of a bitmapped image as a bunch of different dots of different colors. And you know, the more dots you have, the greater the resolution in general. And if you but when you expand a bitmapped picture, you do not get more dots to fill in the space between the dots.

So eventually those dots, the space between the dots gets quite large, and that's where you start getting the problems with resolution. So that's when we talk about if you have a camera with a certain number of megapixels, the more megapixels there are in general, that means the larger you can you can scale up an image before you

start encountering problems with resolution in general. There are other elements that, of course play very heavily into an image is quality, and we've talked about that in our digital photograph the episodes. But but that that was one of the things that gave artists a new tool, was this Illustrator suite of software that would let them create graphics

within UH. This this PostScript language, and now that the PostScript pretty much lived inside printers um at this point and according to UH, according to what Adobe has said, UM, and the inspiration for Illustrator came from John Warnock watching his wife Marva work, and he remembered she was the one who who developed the Adobe logo, and so he what he was doing was he was watching her her draw on paper and said, you know, it would be really cool if we could use PostScript to do this,

to give designers the ability to use a computer to work on design, um, you know, and and and make this a tool for real designers to do real work. UM. So that's that's sort of you know, what was going on. An engineer named Mike schuster Um was behind Illustrated. He was the one who was assigned the task of making this happen UM and uh, you know it it wasn't terribly inexpensive. You know, when it was released it was fos.

But again this is taken in context other other UM software that was similar in in uh in its kind where you know, it was much more expensive than that. So this was it gave people an opportunity to do that and to use it the pen tool, which was more of an approximation of drawing by hand. Of course, at that point, I think most people were using a mouse with it than a pen that um. I think it was probably a few years later when it became more common to use a pen and a tablet to

do it. But you know, still it was a different way to do illustration on a computer, and it was it was a popular tool. By this time. The revenues for Adobe head hit about thirty nine million, and they had a seventy two employees and fort of the revenue at this point came from Apple, So Apple playing a diminishing role in their overall revenue is still a very important one. I mean, thirty nine million is no chump change.

But at this point they also started to license PostScript to companies like little companies with little names like HP and IBM. I think I've heard of those guys. Yeah, And of course IBM at this time was really heavily involved in the personal computer realm. They would eventually kind of step away from that, but not at the moment. And they at this point, Adobe makes another move, so they moved from Palo Alto back to Mountain View, California. Still not the final move for Adobe, by the way.

So you know, just gear you guys up for another exciting talk about relocating a company. There's something else that was happening at the same time. I'm sorry, you were going to say something that, well, it might be related to that, or you're you're talking about the brothers. Ah, yes, yes, are in the same time. In seven, you have a PhD student named Thomas Nol and he was working on a program. It was a program that would let him

display gray scale images on a monochromatic screen. Monochromatic meaning there's one color represented, but gray scale means that you could get different shades of that monochromatic color, which was kind of a big deal, right, you know, it was it was an advance in display technology. And now we're talking about seven. So for people who are used to these, you know, super high definition screens, it's kind of an unusual thing to think about, but we did not always

have those. And so he kind of, you know, was playing around with this program, and he showed it off to his brother John, who worked for a little production company UM, a little like effects and production company Industrial Light and something something magic. I wonder if he asked him if he was sleeping first, Are you sleeping? John? Um? Also another fellow with a similar last name. Wait, now he was another brother named Glenn. Oh. I didn't even

know about Glenn. I knew about Thomas and John, but they they started to work. John had had recommended to Thomas that he look further into this, uh, this program he had created, this which he called display um, and to develop this software further. And so they began to work, the brothers Knoll on this software, and it eventually developed into a different program. Uh. They tried to name it. I forget what it was. They were trying to name it one one. They came up with one name, but

it was already taken. So they went to their fallback name. That fallback name has become something of a a staple on the web and and in uh publishing in general. That name is but do shop. So photoshop created by the brothers Knoll Uh and it was fairly primitive in its early days, but you know, it's now become a verb, so it's obviously important. Well. Adobe, Adobe took notice of this and in they decided to license Photoshop to Illustrator as an add on product. And here's another kind of

funny thing. Adobe didn't really think at that time that Photoshop deserved to be a standalone product. They thought of it as just simply an add on for Illustrator. They didn't think that it would ever be necessarily a revenue generator. Um, so they just they just said, are We'll just create this as an add on for a product we have already published. They would obviously change their minds about that,

uh in a couple of years. But that was also when they produced what was called the font Folio, just a hard drive that had the tire font library from Adobe stored on it, so you could buy a hard drive the head every single font Adobe owned in its library. And it cost a paltry nine thousand, six hundred dollars, which so in in two thousand eleven dollars, which was the latest I could get for a inflation calculator. That's about eighteen thousand dollars. That's a princely sum. It was

a princely sum. It went from paltry to princely in one sentence. Really. Um yeah, And and you know they weren't they weren't the only ones working on these different kinds of technologies. Um. You know I read in an interview with a guy named Paul Brainerd, who you may or may not have heard of. Jonathan is nodding, I have heard of. Um he while while these guys were doing these things. Uh, mr Mr Brainerd was you know,

he came from a newspaper publishing world. Uh. He actually was the editor of the University of Minnesota Daily and uh, you know, during graduate school while he was working there, and he was interested in finding a better way to do page layout at the newspaper. And you know, as a former newspaper newspaperman myself, I remember, even even with the help of computers, having to uh still work on doing layout for pages by cutting the pages out and

pasting them onto the paper to be shot with a camera. Um, you know, by hand. You cut him out with an exactor knife and stick him on there with hot wax. Uh. Kind of a pain in the neck, painting the finger if you weren't paying attention. Um. And he said, you know, there's got to be a better way to do this, and so he started a company named Aldus uh name for Aldus Minutius, who was sort of a typographer himself several centuries before that. UM. Just sort of a keep

this in the back of your mind. But because he's going to come up again in the not too terribly distant future, right, which is actually our past. Well yeah, just blew your mind. Yeah. Well, he he introduced a program called PageMaker, which put him sort of as a head to head competitor with Adobe because they were coming out with similar kinds of products. They were you know,

Adobe was doing uh the PostScript for the printers. PageMaker was sort of a nice compliment in this particular instance because it was able to uh create the pages which could use these fonts and would help newspapers and other

publishing houses take advantage of desktop publishing. Um. But they will not they will not always be so complimentary, and in fact, they will get really really complimentary in the future of our of our discussion and at this the same around the same time, this is when Apple and even Microsoft began to sort of rebel against Adobe and their Type one UH fonts because the the licensing fees

were getting to be pretty expensive and so um. Eventually, what this, what this evolved into, was that Apple and Microsoft UH switched too true Type fonts, which was something developed by Apple U for both mac os and for Windows. So those operating systems began to use Apple's true Type as opposed to the Type one fonts from Adobe. That

won't be the last time that happens. And eventually this actually, this actually led to the development of open type, which suddenly meant that no one ever had to worry about paying huge licensing fees ever again, because now you had an open format version of all these font libraries that were yeah theoretically, oh your your mileage for the word open may vary. Yes. In n Adobe ships a few

new products. They ship Type Manager one and PostScript Level two, and their revenue gets up to about a one million dollars. They've got around three eight three employees, so things were going fairly strong for this company. And you know this look pretty dramatic success story. You know, you look at that first year of revenues where it was well, the fairst year it was zero, and the second year dollars

and now they're already up to over a hundred million. Uh. And in nine, Adobe held a pre release Photoshop workshop called Camp Adobe. Now, at this time they had determined that perhaps Photoshop actually could stand on its own as a as a a standalone software product. It did not necessarily have to be an add on to something else. So they held this pre release workshop to kind of educate people about Photoshop as well as drum up excitement for this product, and then shipped it a little bit

later in nine. They also shipped Illustrator three that same year, and that was the same year where another Adobe employee, Luanne Seymour Cohen, tweaked the Adobe logo to make it uh so that would it could easily scale to different sizes. It was a little um in its original format. It was a little more difficult to do that, but she made some some tweaks to it to streamline that process. And the company was making around a hundred sixty nine

million by then with five eight employees. Um moving forward. Once we hit ninety one, we start getting into the era where Adobe has gotten large enough now where they're looking around at similar companies that make products that either compliment what Adobe area does or overlap what Adobe does. And rather than you know, rather than than simply just

pete or try and create new products. You know, Adobe's gotten large enough now where they can actually look into acquisitions, and so they acquire a company called Emerald City Software and yeah, did you were you off to see the Wizard? Now they they designed m font manipulation software. So Adobe sweeps them up, and uh, they release a few other products like Time Manager, to Photoshop, to h and actually at this point Photoshop too. You know, it's just the

second version. It already begins to outsell Illustrator. So the program that had used Photoshop is just an add on is now being left behind by the add on. The Photoshop is now doing quite well. That's also when Adobe launches a software called Premiere, and Premiere is a video editing software program. So for video editors out there, they're probably very familiar or at least they've heard of Premiere. I'm sure most of them have worked in it in

some capacity. Uh. The original Premiere came out just for Max. They were it was not for Windows yet. And in fact, this is this is kind of the era where the Mac got the reputation. As if you were someone who worked in audio or video editing and you had a desktop computer and not some specialized, you know, proprietary machine, chances are it was a Mac because Max were known for their the software support side for this kind of stuff. So this was part of what gave Max that reputation,

was software like Premiere um. That same year, Warnock writes a memo about a project called Camelot. It is a silly project, Uh, but Camelot is a code name for a product that would really push Adobe into the next level of its development. It's a product called Adobe Acrobat. So Acrobat, let's talk about. You know, here's one of the issues that we have with the whole digital versus

hard copy formats. Right, if you have a digital format and you're trying to put it onto hard copy because of displays, you know, the different different resolutions, different sizes of displays. Uh, sometimes what you would see on your computer would not be what you would get if you send it to a printer. You you couldn't end if

you were to open that same document. Uh, if you were to create a document in a in a program and then open that same document on another computer, perhaps it has a different version of that program, then the layouts could change. So let's say that you have a publishing software program and your buddy has a later version of that same program, and you create this, uh, this this really nice layout for a flyer that you wanted to to distribute. Send it to your buddy because your

buddy has access to a really awesome color printer. Your buddy opens it up on a newer version of that software. But because it's a newer version and there have been changes made since the version that you use to create that, it might change the layout, and suddenly that awesome flyer you made looks really amateurish and it just doesn't look right, and it either requires you to create an inferior product or to spend even more time fixing problems that shouldn't exist.

Adobe developed a file format proprietary file format that was designed so that once you laid things out in the way you want it, that's how it would stay, and it was independent of whatever platform you were using, and a be Acrobat was sort of the first step towards that.

It was the portable document file or PDF. And uh, PDFs are they're very useful because once you design the way the PDF looks, and you said it that way, that's how it's gonna look from that point forward, assuming you're not you know, going in and opening it up and editing it afterward. So Adobe Acrobat was sort of there. It was the this this major project that would create this PDF file format of eventually and what's interesting is that it would eventually become the standard for that kind

of production file. So at this at this time in they hit a revenue of two thirty million, They had seven D one employees, and uh, it was it was really kind of the yet another launching point for Adobe. I mean, it's an other point in their history where they really started to um to establish themselves as a dominant force because you know, the whole font thing was starting to slip away from them, but they were able

to stay on top through the publishing side. Yeah. Now, um, back in there were a couple of companies named macro mind para coomp an author ware that decided to merge and um they basically had been working on a piece of software called Director, which was a tool that people would use to create an interactive content for information kiosks and cd ROM uh, you know, basically cd ROM packaging or you know the video that was on the disc itself. UM.

And they decided to call this company Macromedia. And UH, you know, you if you're if you're new to technology, you may not necessarily have heard that name. But Adobe certainly was aware of this company, especially after the in the mid nine nineties, the Worldwide Web started to become a place to do stuff, you know, a place for people to go and uh, especially for UH. I mean, they had several different technologies that competed directly with Adobe products.

For example, UH Illustrator, which is the vector h illustrating program. UM. Macromedia had a Freehand program that was the name of the software was Freehand, which was the direct competitor UM and of course that was a thorn and Adobe side. But what they really wanted to try to accomplish with something very much like Macromedia's shock Wave and Flash technologies. UM. So this was UM, these these technologies were these these companies merged and around the time that Adobe was really

getting a Foothold and UH in desktop publishing. And during this time, UM or after it directly after that, they had made a name for themselves for all these different photoshop and illustrator software like that. UM. So suddenly, you know, Adobe finds itself faced with a very capable competitor UM,

and especially for the web. They also came up with another tool UM called Fireworks, which I was excited to use because I'm no no graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, but UH, I was doing some simple banner ads and things that that at that point around the time that that came out in UH in the mid nine nineties, and UH Fireworks there wasn't anything like it for on the Adobe side because it was sort of a combination of vector graphics and bitmapped graphics so

that you could use the tools that you would use to to build things. UH you can resize them to any any size you needed and then convert it to a a raster file for use on the web. So if you had to make UM ads for a website like I did, and you had to make them in multiple sizes like I did, UM, you could turn stuff around very very quickly, and so Adobe found itself going,

wait a minute, these guys are these guys are pretty good? Um, and that all started with the merger of those two companies in and around around According the information I've got, that same year, Adobe acquired non Linear Technologies, which made handwriting recognition software, and they also acquired O c R Systems, and o c R stands for Optical Character recognition. So in both of these cases, you're talking about, uh, companies that create software that allow a computer to take one

form of input and UH interpret that as text. So UH that was you know, clearly they were thinking about adding onto this whole digital publication model they were they were pursuing. That same year, they shipped Adobe Dimensions one, which was a three D rendering software, So ah, they were really getting into what was considered to be the future of publication. UH. They also shipped a product called Streamline three, which automated the conversion of bitmapped images into

PostScript line art. UH. And at that year they were making two sixty six million dollars with eight eight seven employees. Now. UM. In ninety three, that's when Adobe officially introduced the portable document format PDF. That was the same year that A a a company called Hummingbird Limited. It's Canadian company that produced something called common Ground. The common Ground was exchange software that would convert Windows or mac document types into

a proprietary file format called digital paper. While that might sound familiar to you, because that's kind of what the p the f foul format is all about. So common Ground launched an ad campaign that was anti PDF, anti Adobe Acrobat to be specific, and ran all these different ads saying that Adobe Acrobat was bad, and then it was you know, no one should use it, and it's it's going to create a monopoly and all this kind of stuff. Um, yeah, they were. They were the to

use um tech marketing lingo. They were the eight pound guerrilla. Yeah, of of graphics and desktop publishing at the time. So digital paper if you're not familiar familiar with that term, but you are familiar with PDF, I think you can see how this battle turned out. Un pound gorillas crush either smaller animals. Yes, yes, the the weak guerrilla was stomped beneath the andrew pound guerrillas feet. But yeah, the the PDF file format did in fact become the industry standard.

Digital paper did not, And that same year Adobe shipped the very first version of Photoshop that was available for Windows, which of course was Photoshop two point five. So Windows users and Windows users get finally get a chance to use Photoshop. Uh, and the Acrobat actually officially ships in June of UM also the first version of Premiere, which is there again their video editing software for Windows, ships that year, so it was Premiere one for Windows, whereas

Premiere three for Mac came out that same year. Yeah, it took it took a little while before the Windows products um from Adobe caught up to the Mac products just in terms of in development, but it wouldn't be long before they were basically working on the same version. Yeah. Again you're talking about, you know, the Mac platform being seen as the the destination for video and audio editing

and even into some extent desktop publishing. It was just seen as that that was more of a Mac type use case, whereas the PC was more kind of seen more as like a spreadsheets and database management that kind of thing. Um. It was an interesting perception which to

some extent still extends to today. I still know that there are I mean, I know plenty of people who work in video publishing who have used both Max and PCs to create video, but have a ah strong opinion about which one is superior, you say that, or at least which one they prefer. Uh. So, Yeah, they were making three million dollars that year, and they hit nine hundred employees. But there's always room for one more. That's

for my haunted mansion. Peeps. Nice, thank you. So a ninety or is a big year, and that's the year we're going to conclude this episode of Adobe our story about Adobe, because ninety four was when a few things happened. One was that Adobe started a venture capital fund called Adobe Ventures. Venture capital is all about finding businesses and investing in them, uh through self interest. I mean, you're not doing it out of some sort of you know, because you think you're going to pay off in the

long run. Right, You're not doing it just because you you you have this warm spot in your heart. You're doing it because you're thinking, Hey, this business is working on something interesting. It had it relates to what we do, it would behoove us to invest in this company so that perhaps one day they will produce something that we can then scoop up and devour. Although they probably don't say it like that, uh, They also acquired a company called Laser Tools, which is another company that was all

about scaling different fonts. So Adobe still not out side of out of that. And then they merge with that company that Chris alluded to earlier, Aldus, which was an electronic publishing giant at the time. Yeah, they they really developed an opportunity to to fit together well, um with their complementary technologies, and I think that that Aldus really had a shot at competing with them head on. But you know, ultimately they decided to to join up to

take on the other competitors out there. And one of the one of the big employees over at Aldis, his name was Bruce Chisen, and Bruce Chisen would become a very important person in Adobe. Uh in just a couple of years. In fact, he had a sort of meteoric rise in the company. UH. And the new company, the

merged company between Adobe and Aldis, was named Adobe Systems Incorporated. UH. It updated that same year, made updates to pretty much its entire line of products, and the revenue hit five nine millions, So they hit over a half billion dollars

and had one thousand, five seven employees. Now granted a lot of that was due to the acquisition the merger, but that kind of sets the stage for part two of our story about Adobe, when things really start heating up and we get into yet another Adobe Apple spat the fonts was just the there was round one. Round two is going to take uh focus on a product we've already mentioned but that does not yet belong to Adobe.

So stay tuned. You can find out more. And if you guys have any suggestions for episodes that we should cover here on tech Stuff, you should let us know because otherwise we're just gonna guess. But if you let us know, you can sess an email. Are at just this tech Stuff at Discovery dot com or less know on Facebook and Twitter are handled there as tech Stuff hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again about Adobe as it turns out really soon for

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