Excerpted from “Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story” (Adobe Press/Peachpit Press).
The past 20 years have seen a sea-change in the way we communicate: from publications printed with warehouse-sized printing presses to those produced by desktop computers, from letters cast in metal to alphabets written in code, from designing for print to designing for the Web. At the center of it all has been Adobe Systems, which this month celebrates its 20th anniversary. Creativepro.com editor in chief Pamela Pfiffner has written the history of the publishing revolution as seen through the lens of Adobe.
Below are two excerpts from “Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story,” which we’ve posted as PDF files so you can see the book’s layout as designed by Andrew Faulkner of afstudio. Much of the art is taken from personal archives of those involved.
The first piece tells what happened when Steve Jobs called John Warnock to discuss putting Adobe’s PostScript language into Apple’s laser printer. Click to read the chapter “Steve Jobs and the LaserWriter.”
The second selection describes the origins of Photoshop and Adobe’s early plans for the product. Click to read a section of “Unleashing Photoshop.”
You can open PDF files in your Web browser. Or you can download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader.
This article was last modified on July 18, 2023
This article was first published on December 3, 2002
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