People Behind "The Print Shop" (1985)

Corey Kosak here. A friend told me this was trending on Hacker News. Ask me anything LOL. Many of the people mentioned in the article are still around so I'll let them know this is happening. :-)

David Balsam popping in. It was a fun time, to be sure! The creativity shown by the users went way beyond the wildest dreams of the developers. I still occasionally see the tattered remains of a Print Shop sign or banner in random storefront windows.

My high school used The Print Shop to make a lot of signage. Having an eye for fonts and a computer and printer at home made it easy to produce fake signs that appeared superficially to be whatever sign I was replacing. "ALL LOCKERS ARE SCHOOL PROPERTY AND MAY BE SEARCHED AT ANY TIME" was easy to change into "ALL THOUGHTS ARE SCHOOL PROPERTY AND MAY BE CONTROLLED AT ANY TIME", etc.

Not having a laminator lowered my success rate at keeping fake signs up, but just putting up new copies worked well until I got caught in the act.

Aside: Anybody remember the Easter Egg game hidden in the Apple II version (and maybe others) of The Print Shop Companion?

My jam was much more Springboard’s The Newsroom then The Print Shop. I loved that software.

In either case I see a through line between those programs and most recently Canva. All see computing as a way to democratize design for the common person, to reduce friction between what someone sees in their head and what shows up on reamed paper (or the web, or social media, etc).

Surprisingly the link doesn't contain any screenshot of the software. I remember using a software named "Print Master" around those years and I was wondering if the two were related.

It seems that the latter was essentially a clone of the former [1], and the companies involved got into a lawsuit. The link also contains screenshots of both, which bought back nice memories of printing banners and calendars.

[1] https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/

I remember in elementary school, coming in and hearing the Apple dot-matrix printer going. It usually meant it was a students birthday and they were getting a banner printed.

I also remember waiting what seemed like forever to see the first color banners when we finally got a color printer. I miss continuous feed paper!

The Print Shop, like several other apple programs I used in the mid 1980s, transformed my interests. Before PS, I thought of fonts as highly minimal: for example, the Apple IIe text fonts (https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2/). When I started to use PS I immediately became interested in how fonts worked and how to render quality fonts in response to user inputs. Realistically, PS must have had lots of extra code that was not part of the Apple II operating system to render its lovely fonts (https://fiu-original.b-cdn.net/fontsinuse.com/use-images/18/...).

After leaving Apple, I switched to PCs/dos/windows and then linux and the font story on those platforms was pretty impressive; I. ignored it for a long time, and then noticed that TrueType became a standard and all the main OSes gained the ability to render complex fonts in real time response to users.

[[[[[THINKING]]]]]

[[[[[PRINTING]]]]]

The first time I saw the pulsating rainbow screens as a second-grader, it blew my mind. I'm not sure my experience with The Print Shop didn't set me on the path toward my early career in publishing. If you needed me after school, you'd find me in the computer lab waiting on a banner.

Favorite border: The one with the square loops in the corners.

This brought back memories of designing and printing reams of dot matrix banners.

Until '98/'99 or so, the C64 was the only computer we at home, and The Print Shop was one of the ~20 or so diskettes kept in the "Used Frequently" storage box. I made so many banners and greeting cards with that thing. Even used it to make all the Birthday and Christmas thank-you cards that my Mom insisted civilized people sent, as long as I personalized it with a thoughtful handwritten line & signature.

I tried to use GEOS but it was just too slow. TPS got me from LOAD "*",8,1 to productivity far, far faster.

The Print Shop was pure awesomeness. Drove my parents crazy when I needed yet another pack of endless paper after printing a couple of banners on my C-64.

With all those low res graphics, you could have awesome state of the art results even with medium talent, as the technology was so limited, which is utterly impossible today.

There really should be endless paper for laser printers. With all those letter and A4 printers, kids will never have the joy we had :D

Print Shop and BannerMania were my two goto printing apps in the 80s. BannerMania had a "transmogrify" feature that iterated through a bunch of design options automatically which was great for me as I sucked at design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_Mania

I feel like there is still a need for this thing, but for reasons I can’t understand, nothing replaced it when it went away.

I mean, Junior High Schools still need big long banners to hang over classroom doors to announce things. Sure, there are no more dot matrix printers to print them on a long perforated sheet. But surely kids would be willing to tape sheets of paper together.

What am I missing?

Made lots of banners and cards. Still have at least one lying around that I rediscovered recently.

I've never believed that people used Print Shop for greeting cards. Perhaps once, as a novelty, but there is no way that anyone would not prefer giving (or receiving) a colorful, professionally printed store-bought one.

Print Shop became a killer app for home computers for the other reasons the article discusses: Custom posters, signs, and banners, the things not readily available at retail.

The Canva of its time...