- Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman (/ˈkaʊfmən/ KOWF-mən; January 17, 1949 – May 16, 1984) was an American entertainer and performance artist. While often called a “comedian”, Kaufman preferred to describe himself instead as a “song and dance man”. He has sometimes been called an “anti-comedian”. He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, once saying in an interview, “I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. The comedian’s promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him. My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can.”
- Steve Jobs, the Xerox Alto, and computer typography (righto.com)
While this is an uplifting story about trusting in destiny, the real source of this computerized “wonderful typography” is the Xerox Alto computer, built by Xerox PARC in 1973. The Alto was a revolutionary system, one of the first to use a high-resolution bitmapped display, a GUI, and an optical mouse. The first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor was created at Xerox PARC in 1974 by Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson and other Xerox researchers. The Alto system supported many high-quality fonts, including proportionally spaced fonts with ligatures.1 Xerox PARC also invented the laser printer in 1971, allowing high-resolution documents to be printed.