The Title

My Personal Publisher comes from my days at Apple Computer when I was in the Competitive Analysis group in Market Intelligence.

I and a friend had come up with this phrase “desktop publishing” to describe the future of the publishing industry with the use of personal computers. I started doing desktop publishing at Apple in 1983 with an Apple /// and a Lisa computer connected to a CompuGraphic phototypesetter. I was producing sales reference manuals for communications products which I could do in-house with a lot better quality than the dot matrix or daisywheel printers that everyone else in the company was using.

My people believe desktop publishing started with the Macintosh, but Mike Heckman and I started it with an Apple ][, a Merganthaler phototypesetter, and an application called Executive Secretary. That was in 1981, in Madison, Wisconsin. The necessity that drove this was the need to create our own literature and brochures for a LaserDisc interface for the Apple II. Yep, the first multimedia product.

We also did documentation for VersaCalc, the first scripting language for a spreadsheet. It allowed you to do deferred execution spreadsheets, and sorting. Things we take for granted these days with MS Excel.

I moved from Madison, Wisconsin to Cupertino, California in 1982, and joined Apple in 1983.

When the first Apple LaserWriter was created it was sitting outside of a cube in one of the Bandley buildings, and I could get to it through the AppleTalk network. I realized this was going to create a revolution in publishing, and wrote a couple of competitive analysis papers explaining why. I wanted to call the new industry “personal publishing” to distinguish it from the difficult and timeconsuming desktop publishing that I was already doing on the CompuGraphic. I could also see a day when you could publish without paper by using computers and communications applications. The guys in Marketing like “Desktop Publishing better than “Personal Publishing” and that title stuck.

I had been online using communications since 1968 in my Naval Security Group days, and I knew the PC would revolutionize that world as well.

So here we are today, typing stuff online, that can be read by anyone in the world who has access to a personal communications device and a browser.

Personal Publishing.

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