The Print Shop Club: Create Apple II Print Shop Printouts in the Browser | Hacker News Reader

The Print Shop Club: Create Apple II Print Shop Printouts in the Browser

theprintshop.club

160 pointsempressplay44 comments

I credit my developing an eye for identifying typefaces to my use of The Print Shop at my public library when I was in elementary school. I don't know that I was aware of the idea of typefaces before that.

My junior high had signs, printed in The Print Shop, announcing administrative minutiae and offering "pep talk" slogans. I'd scratch down the particular combination of typeface, border, and clip art they used then print subtly different replacement signs I'd hang over the originals. It went on for awhile before I got caught sticking one up. (I was particularly pleased with replacing "All lockers are school property and may be searched at any time" with "All thoughts are school property and may be controlled at any time".)

As an aside: The Print Shop Companion on Apple II has a hidden "driver" game on the B-side. You press ESC then CTRL-SHIFT-6 to get to the game. That was one of the first Easter eggs I'd ever seen and I remember having a feeling of wonderment at the idea that secrets could be hidden in software.

I have a similar recollection but on a different app for Windows 95(?) which I'll never recall the name...

Excel 97 had a rudimentary flight simulator game as an easter egg.

I did the same! Although mine was in the days of Photoshop, I just had to mimic it perfectly. It took me making one that said "kill whitey!" before they started asking kids who was doing it and I got ratted out. When I explained it was a quote from Black Sheep the principal kinda laughed and said "yeah.. I know... please stop?"

Thank you so much for doing this. So many of my classrooms were covered in printouts from this legendary program. It's amazing how ubiquitous its printouts were especially in my elementary school days.

That really gave me a massive blast from the past.

I really appreciate the attention to detail to even making the CRT-looking text have some color distortion.

A+

Oh, this brings back memories.

The one advantage tractor-feed paper still has is in printing banners!

One other advantage: High-speed printing.

In the early 90's I worked at a chemical company in a department that sometimes printed labels for sample-size drums of chemicals. We had an enormous tractor-feed laser printer that printed on giant drum-sized stickers. I was told that tractor feed was used because of the speed at which the labels were printed. If you remember the 90's, mechanical handling of individual sheets of paper wasn't very good. Piles of labels was worse.

I have no idea what the tech stack was behind the scenes, but I did each label run with a green screen Wang terminal.

(Fun fact: The administration offices were on one side of a very large, steeply-sloped, man-made hill, and the lab was on the other side. If bad things happened, the sales and administration staff was safe.)

This type of paper and dot matrix printers are still in use in some commercial and industrial settings, like accounting departments or warehouses where they need printers going 24/7. From what I gather this is the most reliable setup in those scenarios.

I still see tractor feed paper in a few businesses, usually where they need paper with multiple carbon copies...since tractor feed also usually means impact dot matrix.

I still see these in some older mom-and-pop auto parts stores, for example.

Print Shop changed my life in several ways. First, it introduced me to fonts at a time when the only fonts available were fixed-width raster fonts. I have loved fonts since then, although pretty much between 1989 to 2001 I stuck with fixed-width fonts for performance and compatibility reasons (linux had terrible font support at the time). I later found out about the font wars (adobe/microsoft/apple) and how the end result was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType

Second, it made me learn bit math so I could render fonts onscreen in high res. That played a huge role in me becoming a better programming (scripter-> coder).

This is fantastic. I'll never forget that feeling of excitement as my carefully crafted card started getting printed on my grandpa's dot matrix printer...

I did so much with Print Shop in MS-DOS. The Apple II version looks a bit different, though part of that could also be that I always had Print Shop Companion as well; I can't remember what was added with that.

Just the word “Print Shop” is nostalgic to the point of physical pain. I used to sneak into the school computer lab at lunch or recess and print out huge numbers of banners which I then covered my room with. Dot matrix 4 Lyfe.

> nostalgic to the point of physical pain.

Perfect description of what I'm feeling right now. It's like some long-dead part of my childhood briefly lurched into life for a moment reopening the wounds of grief at the lost time.

The program that destroyed dot matrix printer ribbons.

You could hear it a mile away in our first year computer lab as a poor Epson FX-80 screamed it's "head" off.

We always had a stack of confiscated floppies of pirated versions.

This is the sound you would hear when you press print: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5kG3E5Jolg

I prefer Eye of the Tiger on dot matrix: https://youtu.be/0ZJvTSPrdF8

Very cool! I made just about all of my birthday cards in early elementary school on the Mac Plus Print Shop. How long do you plan on having the site up?

Man, every birthday party ever thanks to C64!

Wish you could use an iOS device's software keyboard for this!

omg Koalapad. I totally forgot about that. And the very huge banners. and running out of ink after printing just one.

I can hear the dot matrix printer whirring away at my banner. Serious nostalgia.

Anyone have a recommendation for label making software for the Apple ii? My ImageWriter is the only printer I own and I was wanting to run a batch of home brew labels, just like name date og/fg sort of thing.

If you're not looking for fancy typefaces I'd use Appleworks. The database function has label capability if memory serves.

Wow TIL Brøderbund still exists and sells a more recent Print Shop?

https://www.broderbund.com/

Looks like it's been sold at least once and the brand is being licensed out. I'm more impressed that Epic Megagames is still around.

It's weird to think there was a time when practically everyone had dot matrix printers and custom banners adorned every gathering…

Super cool. How is that PDF gateway implemented?

Looks like their emulator MicroM8 has built in support for emulating an Epson MX-80 printer and saving the output to PDF, as well as a virtual modem. https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/help/peripherals/

That's excellent!

Thanks. I guess you went the smarter route looking for a solution :)

I was curious myself... that's beyond what I would expect in an emulator

Answering my own question (partially): some Apple II emulators seem to have that functionality built-in, for instance VirtualII that has "Epson FX-80 and Imagewriter II emulation". Now I wonder what emulator they are using with WASM. They are essentially loading a file called "cyanide.wasm" but I could not find an emulator with that name.

Looks like they mention it in the blog post

https://paleotronic.com/2021/07/13/introducing-the-print-sho...

So how do I output the PDF to my Epson dot-matrix? I was expecting TXT or PRN output....

I've been running the real Print Shop (PC version) in Dosbox with mixed success; LPT-USB passthrough is flaky and I should just throw real DOS on a real PC with a real parallel port.

This would of course be far superior if I could figure out what to do with the output.

Perhaps this could help: https://hackaday.io/project/18140-serial-to-parallel-printer...

That looks soooo weird.

I've never seen it in color before.

Yep I was expecting green on dark green.

I credit my interest in graphic design in part to my mom doing everything in Print Shop and me picking bits up along the way. I remember making a newspaper for the family using their templates and stuff.

But this was into the 90s; never got to look at or use the earlier versions.

Nice to see it!

I went back in time and heard this in my mind while I was waiting for the print job to complete. Thanks, person who made this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEJYNtI2ul4

I loved that rainbow printing screen as a kid

I know, right? THINKING was the most curious thing for 5th grade me. THINKING PRINTING THINKING PRINTING

I forgot it used to pause and think :D

This was an outstanding piece of software. I'm stuck on the printing page though -- maybe we crashed it.

On some browsers if you click away it will suspend WebAssembly execution, if you click back it should continue...

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