Mike Parker

1929–2014. Born in London, Mike earned degrees in architecture and graphic design from Yale. In 1958-59 he was lucky enough to be the person who put in order the punches, matrices and molds at the Plantin Museum. Jackson Burke at Mergenthaler Linotype believed that this experience might be turned to account preparing type libraries for photocomposition machines.

Inheriting the design staff originally trained by Chauncey Griffith, Mike managed the expansion of the Linotype library from a collection of 150 American hot metal designs for text-setting to an inclusive library of nearly 1,500 international digital designs for full page setting.

In 1981, he left Linotype with Matthew Carter to found Bitstream, went on to found The Company in 1987, and Pages Software in 1990. Pages developed a word processor on the NeXT platform which provided the writer with powerful graphic support.