
Gary Starkweather died on December 26, 2019 - sohkamyung
https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2020/1/6/gary-starkweather-passed-away-dec-26-2019-inventor-problem-solver-who-persevered-mentor-for-the-next-generation
======
GreenM3
I can remember when I first met Gary in 1988 in the same building as the Cray
Computer Apple had bought. Gary was so pumped showing a beta version of
Photoshop. At this time Adobe had not bought Photoshop yet and it was written
by the original developers, Thomas and John Knoll. Talking to Gary was always
a pleasure.

The laser printer story is the story everyone wants to hear and you can find
plenty of that on the web.

With Gary’s passing I have been trying to recreate in my mind what Gary was
going through being the solo inventor of the laser printer. Reading the
Computer History interview located here it reminds of what few know about
Gary.
[https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...](https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/04/102702465-05-01-acc.pdf)

Gary is a physics major who knew how to write software. Gary’s speciality was
optics which led to him getting a job in Bausch and Lomb’s division working on
lenses for high end cameras for Hollywood. This story is explained in more
detail on page 7 of the 53 page document above.

Gary being in the Rochester was also where Kodak was located would often say
“The Sky is blue, and the grass is green. No matter what you do with colors
don’t break those rules.” So even when he was at Xerox he thought about color.
It is part of being an expert on optics.

What I think Gary realized in 1967 when he had the “eureka” moment of the
laser printer is if he used a laser to paint a drum the optics totally changes
to a more precise addressing. He knew he could use the laser for CMYK for
color printing, but first step is to do monochrome printing.

On page 6 of the above document, Gary discussed the use of computers to
improve the optics in lens. Why can’t computers use the optics in a laser
printer to print anything you want?

In 1992, I took the bold step of leaving Apple Computer to go work at
Microsoft on Windows 3.1, being program manager for all the Far East TrueType
fonts. But even though I was now in Redmond I would still see Gary in
Cupertino when I would visit family and friends in the bay area. I would visit
Gary to discuss imaging, fonts, DTP, and color. Five years later in 1997, Gary
says he thinks it is time for him to leave Apple. I said why not come to the
Windows Imaging team. He says isn’t really wet there, and he would rather stay
in Saratoga. Luckily Microsoft made an offer Gary could not turn down and now
we were both in Redmond in Windows group. 2-3 years later Gary moved to
Microsoft Research and I think that is the happiest I have seen him when at
work.

Gary explaining his move from Apple to Microsoft is on page 38 of the above
link.

One nice picture that I think will get out there soon is a picture of Bill
Gates at Gary Starkweather’s retirement party. Bill is smiling and Gary is
too. That’s a nice way to end your working career.

~~~
dang
Thanks for these wonderful details. If you do get that picture online, please
edit your comment to add a link to it! I've made it so that your post will
stay editable. Or just email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in
there for you. I'm sure people would love to see it.

------
alankay
Gary was a wonderful person, an engineer's engineer, with an inquisitive
scientific bent and warm sense of humor about and love of invention.

His move from Rochester to Xerox Parc in its earliest days was his "last
chance" according to Xerox management. There he found kindred spirits who
welcomed him and would up quickly loving him for his fearless approach to
invention, no matter how difficult.

He was a great guy to work with and be with (one of the raft of things I did
in the early days of Parc was to experiment with the design and making of high
quality display fonts using an allout video system* that could reach the
limits of video). We realized that it could barely do the much larger
characters needed for the first laser printing system and rigged a coax from
"the old character generator room" down the hall to Gary's lab to provide test
pages for Gary's early experiments.

The story below about the use of Edmund Scientific "hobby" reflecting
telescopes is more or less the way it happened -- except that the front part
that says he was "annoyed" is not. That was not Gary's style; he just moved
forward, and what happened is very similar in spirit to the computer
researchers at Parc building their own simulated mainframe (MAXC) also in the
first year because Xerox wouldn't allow us to buy a PDP-10 which was made by a
competing company.

I also object to him being called "a badass" (I realize it is suppose to be a
compliment, but it quite misses what really top talents are like in its
attempt to suggest some kind of pop-culture teenage aggressiveness. Gary was
an artist who simply transcended difficulties put in his way.)

He now joins another great engineer's engineer at Parc -- Chuck Thacker -- in
our memories of truly great people who could do truly great things.

\--------- * designed by Butler Lampson, Bill English and Roger Bates, and
mostly built by Roger, with an excellent interactive font design program made
by Ben Laws.

------
DevX101
This guy was a badass. He Mcgyvered a 1 kilometer data link using LIGHT
because he was annoyed his employer, PARC, opened up a new office up the road
and he couldn't test his printer.

Excerpt from Dealers of Lightning:

\------

Starkweather and Rider worked together on coordinating the SLOT and character
generator until early 1972, when they were stymied not by a technical obstacle
but one entirely man-made. This was the relocation of more than twenty of
PARC’s seventy scientists up the hill to a building newly rented from the
Singer Company and known as Building 34 (because its address was 3406
Hillview). The Computer Science Lab, including Rider, got bundled off to the
new quarters while everyone else, including Starkweather, temporarily stayed
behind on Porter. The move separated the two by a kilometer of real estate—too
far to string an overhead line and, with the four-lane Foothill Highway in the
way, impossible to link via a ground cable.

“The administrators said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be back together in another
year,’” Starkweather recalled. “I said, ‘Great, what are we supposed to do in
the meantime?’”

But one Sunday afternoon shortly after the move Starkweather got a brainstorm
while sitting at home. He immediately jumped in his car, drove to Porter
Drive, and mounted a stairwell to the roof.

Just as he had thought, he could take line-of-sight aim from where he stood to
the rooftop of Building 34. He might not be able to span the distance by cable
or wire—but he could do it by laser beam.

The next day he ordered four telescopes from Edmund’s for about $300 apiece.
He and Rider replaced the eyepieces of two with low-power lasers and the
others with sensitive photodetectors. They bolted one laser scope and one
detector on each roof, aiming each at its complement across the way, to create
a visible light data link.

The circuit worked flawlessly in almost any weather, even fog, although minor
adjustments were often necessary after a rainstorm, when the weight of
accumulated water made the roofs sag slightly.

“When SLOT was running I’d send a pulse of light up the hill to signal the
character generator to send a line of data down to the detector on my roof,
which would send it down to this laser and then to the printer,”

Starkweather recalled. “After all, we were only encoding ones and zeros. It
was like sending binary data on a long wire made out of light, instead of
copper.”

~~~
david927
There's a funny story in Dealers of Lightning
[[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Lightning)]
where a person driving in fog saw those laser flashes and, in a panic, called
the police

~~~
johnchristopher
There were comments around this thread with book recommendations (good thing I
still had the page opened in firefox on mobile).

How come is it gone ?

~~~
vvillena
I just came back to look for those books too. Does anyone have a list?

~~~
johnchristopher
Yes ! Here are the ones I could grab:

\- The Soul of the New Machine

\- Where wizards stay up late - The origins of the Internet

\- The Idea factory: the great age of american innovation (about Intel ?)

\- The Iridium story: Eccentric orbits (Satellite tech)

\- Empires of light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the race to electrify the
world

\- Skunk works

~~~
johnchristopher
\- the chip how two americans invented the microchip and launched a revolution

That one is about Intel. The idea factory is about Bell.

------
jacquesm
I owe that man a lot. In the 80's I co-founded a company that printed
photographs on ID cards (if you have a European driving license, that's a long
ago descendant of that project). First we did the local tennis clubs, then
student travel cards and finally many more important ID cards. The whole thing
was acquired by Johan Enschede, a specialty printing company (money, IDs,
valuables).

Without the early commercial laser printers that whole project would not have
been possible, for us it was an enabling technology.

I never knew about Gary Starkweather but I'm super grateful for what he did.
There are countless other mostly invisible people from that era who created
such enabling technologies.

------
GreenM3
I knew Gary for 31 years at Apple and Microsoft and after. Here is a tribute I
wrote. [https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2020/1/6/gary-
starkweather-p...](https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2020/1/6/gary-starkweather-
passed-away-dec-26-2019-inventor-problem-solver-who-persevered-mentor-for-the-
next-generation)

~~~
dang
Thanks! This is much more fitting than
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Starkweather](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Starkweather),
so we've changed the URL above to it.

Are there any stories you'd care to add for the audience here? HN readers love
personal/inside accounts, and of course are comfortable with technical detail.

------
williamDafoe
Easily the most trivial $1T inventions of all time! Spinning hexagonal mirror,
laser, modulated by a serial port running at 14mhz, roughly. A 2 week hardware
project and 3 month software project! I am ex Xerox Office Systems Division,
1984, I work at 3406 Hillview Ave, and heard it from work! It created a whole
industry of repurposing hardware for new purposes like rockem sockem robots, I
did it for our Internet radio service, 1994, at UBC ECE Dept. Just repurposed
a portable AM/FM CD player and digitizer board.

~~~
Rediscover
Thank You, nice post

------
dang
Is there a more meaningful article that we can change to? One that includes
the information that he died? (Edit: a more meaningful article appeared and we
changed to it—see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002822))

An interview from 2017:
[https://digitalprinting.blogs.xerox.com/2017/06/29/marking-4...](https://digitalprinting.blogs.xerox.com/2017/06/29/marking-40-years-
of-xerox-laser-printing-with-its-inventor-gary-starkweather/)

A talk from 1997:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZFaQiItckU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZFaQiItckU)

Another talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiLDiWh6iBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiLDiWh6iBY)

~~~
rahuldottech
I don't think any of these can replace the article, but related links for
readers:

National Inventors Hall of Fame page for him:
[https://www.invent.org/inductees/gary-k-
starkweather](https://www.invent.org/inductees/gary-k-starkweather)

Obituary: [https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/sanford-
fl/gary-s...](https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/sanford-fl/gary-
starkweather-8975397)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Color management is a _really_ wild aspect of software development.

It’s now almost ubiquitous, but it used to be something that was downright
miraculous.

ColorSync was cool. The group I lead actually developed our own CM engine, so
I am quite aware of the types of challenges (and rewards) involved.

------
LordLotherak
May the lights of our homes dim in his memory.

------
skiacolor
Had the pleasure of working with him at Apple... truly a great guy

------
JohnJamesRambo
RIP Gary, thank you for saving me from inkjet ink cartels.

~~~
pravda
Inkjets came after laser printers. Gary saved us from the _rat-tat-tat-tat_ of
the dot matrix printer.

Very annoying sound.

~~~
sohkamyung
Before laser printers, I believe line printers were the printers of choice for
high throughput. But the noise they made would have been incredible.

~~~
macjohnmcc
I used to work for a company that had a band printer. The characters were on a
metal band like that in a band saw with duplicates of the letters around the
band. The printer would spin that band around and make an imprint. It was
incredibly fast and incredibly noisy. The printer had to be in a noise
dampening enclosure.

~~~
drfuchs
IBM mainframes in the 70's invariably came with the IBM 1403 high-speed band
printer, which pretty much represented the apex of band-printing technology.
They printed 132 column, 66 line pages of EBCDIC text at a few seconds per
page (depending on how many lines were blank, which characters were being
printed, and what band you had installed). They were about the size of a
washer and dryer pair, and made a pretty big racket. The computer operators
(!) loaded them with special "green band" paper stock that came in boxes about
the size of a 12-ream box of printer paper you'd buy at OfficeDepot today, but
it was all one big continuous z-fold piece, with sprocket holes down each side
for the printer to grab and power it through the paper path. Jobs were printed
with special "separator pages" to help to operators find where to split the
perforated printouts and deliver them to the right users' collection bins.

~~~
DrScump
Then in the 1980s, IBM came out with the 3800 laser printer, which was just
insane for the time -- continuous form printing at speed, like a newspaper
printing press. I got to operate them (my department had two).

------
brlewis
> Going back in time 50 years ago the resistance to commit to the laser
> printer for high performance office printing was so high Gary’s only option
> to finish his invention was to move from corporate to a supportive
> environment at Xerox PARC.

I think this is the kind of thing Sam Altman was talking about related to
important not always being popular, and the need to persevere.

------
forgotmyhnacc
Many people from the PARC days are passing away :( end of an era.

------
chris_wot
I hate to ask this, but what is their source for this?

~~~
sohkamyung
I learned about it from a Facebook post by the Computer History Museum [1].
The post doesn't mentioned a source, though.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/computerhistory/photos/a.3917377158...](https://www.facebook.com/computerhistory/photos/a.391737715815/10157952270845816/)

------
LeoPanthera
I know it's policy, but the original headline (which included "inventor of the
laser printer") was more enlightening.

~~~
rblatz
That’s been my opinion on a lot of these, they edit the headline and make it
less helpful.

~~~
dang
That's because it's a global optimization rather than a local one:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22work%20a%20little%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

There's a rarer and more special consideration in a case like this as well.
Taking out "inventor of the laser printer" adds more information than it
removes. It adds the information that Starkweather is significant enough that
HN readers ought to know who he is. If that information were hard to obtain,
there might be a tradeoff here, but since it's literally one click away, I
think the benefit of this edit outweighs the cost.

