On the afternoon of Dec 26th I heard from Gary Starkweather’s wife Joyce that Gary had left us. She asked if I could share the news with Microsoft friends as I worked at the company when Gary was there and I was the one who got him to leave Apple for Microsoft. Given the holidays I knew that most would not be reading e-mail. After a few days I reached out through LinkedIn to a few in Microsoft who were at the company when Gary joined in 1997.
There was one post on LinkedIn my Michael Shamiyeh on Gary’s passing away. Otherwise there was no news. On Jan 2nd I started thinking about how to write about Gary’s life, and that is when I realized I had known Gary for 31 years. Searching for what to write I went back through what has been written on Gary. The Dealer’s of Lightning book on Xerox PARC has a whole chapter (#9) on Gary called “The Refuge.” Talking to Joyce Starkweather was helpful to review Gary’s life and it was nice to hear how she is doing and his family. Joyce gave me background on Gary’s discussion with Michael Shamiyeh and she pointed out how much time Gary had worked with Mike Sinclair. I told Joyce I would reach out to Michael and Mike and both have been helpful to capture Gary’s ideas he shared.
Gary’s service was going to be on Jan 8 and there was still no other news on Gary’s passing in any news sites. So I posted my tribute on this website on Jan 6 which was out there for a while with a few hundred visits and then I posted my tribute on news.ycombinator site and within days there were over 5,000 views. Which is nice but not enough.
Thanks to Michael Shamiyeh’s efforts to get the news out the WSJ and NYTimes were interested in writing obituaries and I was able to chat with both the writers to review Gary’s life and provide a plain English explanation of how a laser printer works. Both writers did an excellent job of summarizing Gary’s life and contribution.
And yesterday, Jan 16th the Washington Post put their obituary up on the web.
Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer, dies at 81
By Matt Schudel Jan. 16, 2020 at 3:40 p.m. PST
Gary Starkweather, who defied his corporate boss to invent the laser printer, a revolutionary development that made it possible to print images and text directly from computer terminals in homes and offices, died Dec. 26 at a hospital in Orlando. He was 81.
Three weeks ago Gary left this earth and now there are memorials of Gary on the NYTimes, WSJ, and Washington Post. Oh and my blog post and Michael’s LInkedIn post.
But this is just the beginning of memorializing Gary’s work as Joyce has boxes of Gary’s work including his original log books from inventing the laser printer. People would always ask Gary to tell the story of inventing of the laser printer.