Whatever happened to Adobe PrintGear?

[Vanadium 50]

TL;DR Summary

Adobe once tried to market a lower-cost version of PostScript, called PrintGear. It was a flop. Why? And why is there so little mention of it?

When the Apple LaserWriter came out, it used a page definition language called PostScript. Half a century later, it is still in use. It was completely revolutionary - not only did it launch the entire desktop publishing industry, there really has been no better alternative since.

In the mid 1990s, Adobe came up with a lower-cost less capable product called PrintGear. It was intended to be less expensive to implement (it was), less expensive to license (couldn't have been any more), faster for simple pages (maybe) and could print identical pages as "real" PostScript.

A bunch of printers with it appeared, and promptly disappeared. What the heck happened?

The internet record is very sparse. You can find essentially what I wrote, and some links to T-shirt printers. And that's about it. There doesn't even appear to be Windows driver. Retrocomputing sites ignore it.

Anyone know what happened?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Adobe once tried to market a lower-cost version of PostScript

I'm just taking a wild guess, but it sounds like it didn't make them money and possibly cost too much to support both.

https://adobe.fandom.com/wiki/Adobe_PrintGear

 

[jedishrfu]

I heard a similar story with Borland when they dropped Turbo Prolog. Borland said they sold a total of 60,000 copies and felt that was too small a market.

They transferred ownership and support back to the Danish company PDC aka the original developer who sells a version of it to this day now known as Visual Prolog.

Borland faded away and is no more.

—-

Concerning PrintGear, ChatGPT provides a plausible reason:

- use of PDF technology in document production
- better printers that supported pdf technology


Adobe PrintGear was a printing technology that Adobe introduced in the 1990s. It was designed to improve printing performance, especially for consumer-level printers and lower-end devices that couldn't fully support PostScript (Adobe's flagship page description language used in high-end printing). Here’s an overview of what happened to Adobe PrintGear:

1. Introduction and Purpose: Adobe PrintGear was developed as a simplified printing solution. While PostScript was widely used in high-end printing environments, it required significant processing power. PrintGear was designed to enable faster and more efficient printing on low-cost, consumer-level printers. It allowed printers without the full capability to interpret PostScript to still benefit from Adobe's printing technology.

2. Declining Need for PrintGear: Over time, the need for Adobe PrintGear diminished for several reasons:
- Advancements in Printer Technology: Printer hardware improved significantly, allowing lower-end printers to directly support more advanced printing languages, including PostScript and newer, more efficient alternatives like PDF (Portable Document Format). As these printers became more capable, there was less need for an intermediate technology like PrintGear.

- Emergence of PDF as a Standard: PDF became the dominant format for document exchange and printing. Since printers could easily interpret and render PDF files without needing a complex language like PostScript, it became the standard for printing workflows, reducing the need for PrintGear.

- Competition and Alternative Printing Solutions: Other printing technologies, such as HP’s PCL (Printer Command Language), continued to dominate in consumer-level printers, and PDF-based workflows became increasingly common. Adobe's focus also shifted towards enhancing PDF technologies rather than maintaining PrintGear.

3. Phase-Out: As Adobe’s strategic focus moved towards PDF and related technologies, PrintGear gradually became obsolete. There was little reason to continue investing in it as printer hardware and other software solutions evolved.

Adobe PrintGear was phased out due to advances in printer capabilities, the rise of PDF as a universal document format, and changing market demands. It is no longer in use or supported by Adobe.

 

[Vanadium 50]

it sounds like it didn't make them money

That's true, but kind of tautologocal. If they were making oodles of money, they'd be selling it today.

The problem with PostScript and cost was that the rendering engine was an entire computer: indeed, the LaserWriter was more powerful than the Macintosh that drove it. As I understand it, PrintGear got around this by using an ASIC instead.

Thing is, an ASIC's cost is mostly in development. So Adobe would have had a strong incentive to slash prices and get what cash they could. But that seems not to have happened.

 

[Vanadium 50]

As an aside, I don't think Adobe ever considered royalties of a few hundred dollars on a PC printer was their primary market. It was royalties of many, many thousands on a Linotype.

 

[Rive]

I did not find much either. But:

Thing is, an ASIC's cost is mostly in development.

That's very true. But at the end, they had to compete with the scraps of the whole rapidly developing non-printer-specific CPU/DSP business.
My guess is that Moore just silently got those ASICs (together with the idea) obsolete.

Kind of like those TIGA (VGA) cards.
Great history.

 

[Vanadium 50]

It's a good point. Today one usually gets an ASIC using a process that is a few steps behind - less contention, and usually this is good enough anyway. But things may have been different back then.

TIGA I think was a different case. They were very expensive, the Windows drivers really didn't take full advantage of the hardware, and arguably they solved the wrong problem. They dramatically sped up going from data on the card to data on the screen, but were still bottlenecked by getting data onto the card. VESA Local Bus (and to be fair, MCA) better addressed that bottleneck.

 

[Rive]

I have to admit that for me TIGA was already just a piece of history when I first seen such a card, but given that this kind of specialized segment (workstations and their cards) still exists I think they could have made it - what killed it was that the hardware was so specialized and exclusively for that purpose only that the general purpose hardware could catch up and take over.

I may be wrong. But it's history anyway.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I think TIGA also came about at a bad time.

Let's go back to the IBM PC launch. One of the graphics options was the PGC or Professional Graphics Controller. It cost more than the PC, and I don't think it even fit in the original non-XT case. The value proposition was that you could do CAD for $10K and not $50K a seat,

What was the TIGA value proposition? More color depth, and with an expensive monitor, better resolution. In principle, better responsiveness but in practice not so much, and it was well before game frame rates were a thing. That is, most business apps ran OK without it, and gaming wasn't yet a "thing".

Then the ATI Mach 8 entered the picture. Supported a competing standard (8514), cost 1/2-1/3 as much, and had similar real-life performance.

 

[Vanadium 50]

they had to compete with the scraps of the whole rapidly developing non-printer-specific CPU/DSP business.

I think that's it.

I found some specs on the ASIC. It ran at 60 MHz. That was the speed of CPUs in that day, so it probably used an up-to-date process. Shortly thereafter, many CPU vendors entered the Super Socket 7 wars.

If competition drives the mid-market's cost up, people will go either up or down.