A Tongue-in-Cheek Look Back at Broderbund's 'The Print Shop' (2021)(theprintshop.club) |
A Tongue-in-Cheek Look Back at Broderbund's 'The Print Shop' (2021)(theprintshop.club) |
Printshop and early computer magazines with two-three pages of examples code I would type into qbasic are the reason I'm in this career.
It was like a... like a meta killer app.
It was available on all major platforms so it wasn't a killer app for one platform; it was like a killer app for HOME COMPUTING IN GENERAL at a time when regular people still weren't exactly sure wtf these newfangled machines were good for.
Sure, everybody knew you could play games on computers, but you could also do that on a $100 Atari VCS that in some ways outperformed a $2,000 Apple II setup. You could do spreadsheets, but honestly most people didn't know what spreadsheets were. You could do word processing, which was obviously pretty useful, but early word processors didn't even have things like spell checking and it wasn't immediately obvious that they were that much better than just using a typewriter and a bottle of correction fluid.
But Print Shop?
It was brilliantly easy to use, and the ability to print out signs -- and banners! -- was just revelatory. Even the 62 year-old secretary in primary school could use it, and she absolutely did.
It's a strong contender for the most influential home computing app of all time, and it has zero peers in terms of how underrated/overlooked it is in the history of home computing.
https://www.abandonware-france.org/ltf_abandon/ltf_jeu.php?i...
The relationship between these programs is quite fascinating, as it led to legal action between Brøderbund (PrintShop) and Mindscape (PrintMaster). Interesting passage from the case: For example, in the "Custom Layout" screen of "Print Shop," the user is instructed to press the "Return" key on the Apple keyboard. Similarly, in the "Custom Layout" screen of "Printmaster," the user is instructed to press the "Return" key on the IBM keyboard. Actually, the IBM keyboard contains no "Return" key, only an "Enter" key. Lodge admitted that Unison's failure to change "Return" to "Enter" was a result of its programmers' intense concentration on copying Print Shop
We had a dot matrix printer too and oh did I enjoy printing out the various included graphics and peeling the perforated strips off the edges so I could show the results to everyone. The palm tree graphics were my favorite.
WinWorldPC has a nice collection if anyone is itching to fire up an 86Box VM to revisit the software:
What a world!
I think it was one of the first tools that
got people to consider their PC could be used
for more than word processing
Word processing was only kinda sorta a killer app. If you used one, you knew how superior it was to a typewriter. But most people hadn't used word processors, and the vast majority of people didn't need a typewriter anyway, so the idea of a $2,000 magic typewriter that was 10x as complicated and took up much more desk space was not that enticing to... well, most people.
But anybody could use Print Shop, and even if you didn't use Print Shop, those signs and banners were ubiquitious around schools and offices, so you'd see what other people made with Print Shop.
And the people using Print Shop weren't techies. Secretaries, moms, teachers, they all used it. That was also like a form of advertising for home computing. If you were on the fence about whether home computing was for you, the hardcore nerd in your office crunching spreadsheets all day didn't exactly inspire confidence that these machines could be used by mere mortals as well. But when your kid's 55 year old kindergarten teacher was blasting out primo banners and signs, it told you: home computing was for regular people, too.
I recall doing as much as I could with my Apple //c and a dot matrix printer. My art skills were crap, but that didn't stop me. Browsing the border styles, trying to use the custom.. something.. mode where you could make graphics yourself.
I think I even got a color ribbon for the printer once!
Having sent off a rediculous number of stamped Christmas cards last week, I can completely empathize!
I can get close to 15-20 cards for the price of the ink cartridges and that's not even touching the price of buying software to print cards.
Store-bought cards offer some things now that you can't (easily) get with a laser-printed "card", though, such as 3D shapes (such as pieces that unfold when you open the card) and music-playing modules.
The EcoTanks share a lot of capabilities of the SureColor lines, have some great design software, and can do real borderless printing. It's the ecosystem and compatibility that make it.
They make great backgrounds for collage and pair really well with things like linotype and block printing, which there are a lot of models for if you have a 3D printer.
Can you expand on this a little? Thanks.
But it's very difficult to beat the cost of a laser printer, especially for infrequent prints.