Annals of No One Cares But Me: Big pixel drivers
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had a peculiar interest in two topics just about no one should or does care about: Drivers for unexpected output devices, and bigpixels. These interests were piqued by my place of employment. I worked at Interleaf, an early innovator in electronic publishing. Back in the day, we had to write our own drivers for the rare and expensive high-resolution printers able to show off the high-res, proportionally printed, typeset-quality, text ‘n’ graphic output our software was able to create. So, I naturally used to care about odd output devices — e.g., eventually our software was used to print low-res codes on soda cans — and output composed of huge pixels.
Therefore, I was delighted to read in the Boston Globe about Artaic, a company that uses a computer to translate images into robotically-created mosaics. It’s got it all: An unusual output device that uses macro-scale pixels.
Yay.
What has happened to Interleaf since then? In the late 80s and early 90s, I worked with a contractor who had a huge software contract with a government agency. My task was to design a format for a staff of 300+ mostly engineers to use to produce the enormously voluminous documentation required. Then I had to teach it and enforce its use by, unfortunately, prohibiting the more innovative and complex components some writers came up with, in the interest of consistency. It was the most interesting job I had in my short career in tech world.
Above, I omitted the fact that all employees had Interleaf on a Unix operating system — my first experience with file sharing.
Interleaf was acquired by Broadvision in Jan. 2000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.....nterleaf