Gary Starkweather died on December 26, 2019

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

by sohkamyung • 7 years ago

415 74 7 years ago

greenm3.com

LordLotherak• 7 years ago

May the lights of our homes dim in his memory.

forgotmyhnacc• 7 years ago

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

DevX101• 7 years ago

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.”

stevespang• 7 years ago

Amazing.

sdoering• 7 years ago

just bought the audiobook. this sounded so much like a great 'read', that I am looking forward to it. thanks for the teaser and showing the book.

trekrich• 7 years ago

That book is awesome, if you are into computer history. This is a must read.

johnnyAghands• 7 years ago

Wow. So just added that book to my cart. Any other good reads like this you recommend?

slumdev• 7 years ago

mounted a stairwell to the roof

Is that a new line-of-sight networking device?

jagged-chisel• 7 years ago

Can't tell if serious ...

"mounted" like mounting a horse.

david927• 7 years ago

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

johnchristopher3• 7 years ago

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 ?

JohnJamesRambo3• 7 years ago

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

pravda• 7 years ago

Inkjets came after laser printers. Gary saved us from the rat-tat-tat-tat of the dot matrix printer.

Very annoying sound.

JohnJamesRambo3• 7 years ago

But if there were no lasers I would have probably been paying my monthly tithe to HP forever.

sohkamyung3• 7 years ago

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

themodelplumber• 7 years ago

Did they rat-tat? I must have just missed those. I remember a lot of high-pitched _reeeee_ sounds, though certainly accompanied by a fascinating crunchy texture. :-)

taneq• 7 years ago

MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

MRR MRR

MR MR MRRRR MR

MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

With little "voop voop" noises in between when it moved without printing or fed more paper. And then you get to pull the tractor holes off the side of the paper. :)

C1sc0cat3• 7 years ago

Not as loud as daisy wheel printer

JohnJamesRambo3• 7 years ago

Maybe it is the nostalgia talking but I kind of liked the dot matrix printer sound.

mc3• 7 years ago

Laser printers have cartels too. And workarounds.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

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.

LeoPanthera• 7 years ago

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

rblatz• 7 years ago

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

dang4• 7 years ago

That's because it's a global optimization rather than a local one: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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.

dang4• 7 years ago

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)

An interview from 2017: https://digitalprinting.blogs.xerox.com/2017/06/29/marking-4...

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

Another talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiLDiWh6iBY

rahuldottech• 7 years ago

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

Obituary: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/sanford-fl/gary-s...

skiacolor• 7 years ago

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

williamDafoe• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

Thank You, nice post

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 years ago

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.

chris_wot• 7 years ago

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

sohkamyung3• 7 years ago

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...

GreenM32• 7 years ago

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...

dang4• 7 years ago

Thanks! This is much more fitting than 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.

brlewis• 7 years ago

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.

GreenM32• 7 years ago

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...

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.

dang4• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

Gary Starkweather died on December 26, 2019

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