People Behind “The Print Shop” (1985) | Hacker News Reader

People Behind “The Print Shop” (1985)

theprintshop.club

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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. :-)

Hey, just want to say THANK YOU for empowering a lot of us - we created so many banners, flyers, etc for a lot of for-good activities.

When I first find out you can print a single desain over multiple pages (banners), my mind was blown. Me and my friends then went quite wild with it.

Thanks again. Much appreciated.

Thank you for the kind words. But I can't take any credit for the creativity behind the product. My role was doing a variety of ports: the Commodore 64 version "side B" (side B of the floppy which had its own set of graphics and fonts that were redrawn to match the scale of the idiosyncratic Commodore printer... was it the 801?) Also the Atari 400/800 port (I ran out of RAM so I decided get rid of Atari DOS and instead write a mini file system sufficient to write save files to the Atari Drive (model 810 I think). The things people let you get away with when you're a teenager... And then the Apple //gs version which was a total rewrite from the ground up and had a variety of new stuff in it.

The credit is due to David and Marty but there's also an interesting backstory. As I understand it, the prototype that David & Marty first brought to Br0derbund was a "Greeting Disk". As in "Wouldn't it be fun for people to be able to make a dynamic, custom greeting disk that they can give to their friends to boot on their computer?" A great idea really, but perhaps a little ahead of its time. I believe it was Br0derbund's Richard Whittaker who first suggested to them "how about printing instead?"

I just remembered... I think my greatest contribution was in the field of """user experience""" for the Atari 400/800. For printing we had to figure out which way users had their "auto line feed" DIP switch set on their printer. I felt like it would be rather off-putting to ask the user something so technical during setup while they're just trying to get going. So my big idea was to print a big V (like \/) then a carriage return and then an inverted V (like /\). Then the program would ask them whether they saw a diamond or a squiggle on their printer.

Yeah, Richard W. suggested adding a print function to our original demo (called Perfect Occasion). I ran with that and started designing an interface for printed cards. Marty was the wiz who came up with the idea of not just doing a "screen dump" to the printer, but using the highest native resolution of each dot matrix printer currently on the market to make the printouts look "sharp". The original code for Perfect Occasion became the "Screen Magic" option in Print Shop.

That's so cool, I don't remember hearing that. Probably because I got involved a bit later, when PS was nearly complete. I did work with Richard W quite a bit back then. I thought it was cool how Marty stored the color graphics in the later version as separate bit planes CMYK.. or was it just CMY? Fun stuff writing graphic editors for the IIGS version that used that same format where nowadays bitmaps are interleaved. Optimizing the editors for this peculiarity was a fun challenge back then.

With the IIGS version we ended up using only the mouse pointer and ProDOS from the system and inventing our own GUI. Fun times. And writing our own printer and i/o card drivers, what were we thinking!? Well, those were the "don't trust any code you didn't write yourself" days. I still feel that way to certain extent and it makes for longer lasting code.

Thanks for Print Shop! I made tons of banners and cards with my C64 in the '80s. :-)

Were you also involved in making Music Shop? I loved that program as well, and I can still hum some of the tunes that were included with it, like Kajun Klog, Oogie Boogie and the various arrangements of classical repertoire.

Awesome, no I didn't really have any involvement with Music Shop. And (see above) I can only take credit for your banners and cards if you had the Commodore 801 printer :-)

I had one! I loved The Print Shop.

do you think it was a better or easier time to start a company back then and bootstrap it VS today and why or why not?

I don't have any experience starting a company so I can't say. I will say that computers (and therefore expectations) were vastly simpler back then. You could reasonably believe you understood exactly what was happening in every piece of your Apple ][, and that allowed you to sometimes do some clever/tricky stuff with it.

My point is that this scale meant that one person could write a program of publishable quality all by themselves. This would be borderline impossible today. I'm thinking of AAA video games and their enormous development costs. It's still possible to do some quirky or cult products (like agar.io or homestuck or whatever) that could be the work of one person.

In some ways, I think it was easier to get something unique going. The market was quite new and hungry for applications that made computers useful for everyday people.

Print Shop was absolutely one of those "applications that made computers useful for everyday people" for sure! Also, Print Shop on an Apple ][+ (Wow! A whole 64K of RAM and a 1Mhz CPU! So powerful! LOL!) with one of the earliest Epson 24pin dot-matrix printers, in combination with some crafty "cut and paste" skills (back when "cut and paste" still meant exacto-knife, rubber cement, and photocopy) made teenage-me a whole lotta spending money back then sellin' my "document design skills" to local businesses. My eternal thanks to all y'all folks who created Print Shop! May it live forever in the history books as the masterful achievement it was! ;)

Chiming in with many others here. When I was 3 my mom would take me into her office on occasional weekends and she managed to get me to memorize enough to open The Print Shop. From there I could print all sorts of dinosaurs and interesting things to a dot matrix printer, and then color as much as I wanted. It connected tech to me as a tool to reach for at a very young age. I definitely would have had a very different route into tech later if I even had one. Thank you all!

As a fellow Ivy Leaguer, is it fair to say that getting recommendation letters written by two Harvard College grads who had made it big helped in getting in when you finally decided to get the degree?

Not many people can say that they helped bring about a social and technological revolution with their work. You can (And the Porsche wasn't a bad reward, either!).

I don't know everything that goes on in the minds of college admissions officers, but I don't think alumni recommendation letters matter very much to them. For me what worked I assume (and this was 35+ years ago, mind you) is having great test scores, starting college four years late, and having what perhaps looked like an entrepreneurial spirit. So I had elements of my background that seemed unusual / interesting and that may have caught their eye. I can only speculate. I got offers from other colleges where I had no alumni connection so I don't think it's about that. As for the Porsche 924, meh. It was a regrettable money-pit, a hand-me-down from my father and, as I was constantly reminded by car enthusiasts, "basically a Volkswagen".

Corey - I'm starting a new children's computing company and I've literally shown my old Print Shop creations to investors when explaining what we're doing. Would love to tell you more about what we're building -- we're trying to make software in 2024 that makes kids feel what I felt in 1990 when using software like the Print Shop, KidPix, Pinball Construction Set, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and others. You can contact me at amal@cartwheelcomputer.com

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 mom’s hard and fast rule when buying a new computer: It had better run Print Shop. She was barely computer literate but that program was soooo useful to her. You guys did a great thing.

That's great to hear, thank you! They were fun days, for sure. One of the most fun activities were the conventions that were created around Print Artist, the successor to Print Shop. PALs (Print Artist Lovers) were quite rabid with their love for the program. Blew me away.

David, I consumed a huge amount of dot matrix printer in my elementary school with Print Shop, making every kind of card and banner you can imagine.

30 years later I am starting a company to reimagine technology's role in childhood. In 1990, my friends and I were eating garbage from McDonalds and using brilliant software like Print Shop, KidPix, Pinball Construction Set, etc. In 2024, kids are eating organic pasta salad but poisoning their brains with garbage content on YouTube and Roblox designed to addict them.

Would love to tell you more about what we are working on. You can contact me at amal@cartwheelcomputer.com.

Thanks!

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?

"It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process.. Nothing signed “THE MGT.” would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management."

I solved a shared lunchroom problem with a Brother labeler, using the same wide yellow labels that someone in the office used.

"NO MICROWAVING FISH"

Yes, DRIVER!! That was the best Easter Egg. You can play it here [1], Escape Control+6 after booting.

I loved that game so much as a kid. I made a clone of it as an entry to the IOCCC which won [2]. Sadly it no longer works in modern terminal emulators, but a slight modification [3] fixes it. Instructions here [4].

Aside, I got up to similar shenanigans in high school. Printed out "Y2K Compliant" stickers and stuck them on everything. My mother was a teacher so I did have access to a laminator ;) a privilege I left sadly underused.

[1] https://archive.org/details/328_Print_Shop_Companion_Side_B

[2] https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2001_ctk

[3] https://chris.pacejo.net/programs/ctk-fixed.c

[4] http://www.ioccc.org/2001/ctk.hint

Roland Gustafsson here: I had forgotten that I added that Easter egg! Yeah, that game was something I wrote for fun and just threw it in there. Every program I worked on back in the day had at least one Easter egg. Usually many!

Nice to meet you, thanks for the reply! I'll have to try to find the others :)

Oh, wow. This is one of the reasons I love Hacker News.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting!

Also, it was only the Apple II version that had Easter Eggs, even though I ported the C64 and Atari versions myself, that was my first experience with those machines so didn't have time to play around. I did the ports in record time, however, due to my abstracting all "system stuff" for the Apple II version, saved so much time with the others, didn't hurt that they were also 6502, however. :) I did not port the PC version.

I remember fondly "Roland was here but he left". I learned so much from studying your programs!

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).

I loved the Newsroom! Made tons of news letters for fun and for school projects.

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 used Print Master a lot and had no idea it was a clone of something else, in fact, today is the first time I learn about The Print Shop, so thanks for that link!

The sound of the dot matrix printer late at night ...

IIRC Print Master supported lowercase letters whereas Print Shop did not. I didn't see any mention of that in the article link above (admittedly I scanned it pretty quickly). I was also a Print Master person because I had a PC Clone (Tandy 1000EX).

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.

True, there was certainly no support in the Apple II OS for fonts. I think the OS that came with the IIGS (GS/OS?) may have had font support (but IIGS Print Shop didn't run on top of GS/OS; it booted and took over the machine).

The fonts in Print Shop were bitmaps, drawn at the resolution of the target printers. The code did some modest algorithms on them for kerning, plus italic, underline, and outline style.

I do recall Marty talking a lot about how the product might support resolution-independent vector fonts (this was before such a thing was a standard part of the OS). But of course modern machines caught up and later versions of the product just started using OS fonts.

[[[[[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

For years after my last dot matrix printer, my mom made me buy reams of fanfold computer paper for her. She loved taking notes with it. "It's so convenient!"

Indeed I think David & Marty's genius was making a tool that had both freedom and guardrails, so people could build something creative without being overwhelmed with too much complexity.

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?

It didn't go away. Several different, confusingly named and numbered, versions are available currently:

https://www.broderbund.com/

I can only guess.

Maybe, when the only printer the classroom had was an Epson FX-85, banners were low-friction. Everything you printed was a banner, until you burst the pages. Coloring it in was optional. Making a banner with a contemporary printer, however, requires arts&crafts effort before you have anything?

Or maybe it's more about kids spending much more time with digital than with atoms?

Attention spans, priorities, early personal-brand-marketing nudges by helicopter parents or influencer role models and peers, less mystique/novelty about doing things with computers?

Canva is as close as it gets, and yeah, no banners

Taping sheets together is not as easy or as fun as you think. The fun part of making a banner was letting print for however long and then carefully tearing it off and then you could just hang it.

Also, people make whatever they want in MS Word using Comic Sans. Why pay for a a specialized tool when you can use the same thing you write your thesis in?

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.

Computer printed cards had a novelty factor vs professional e "boring" cards people had received their whole lives. They also felt handmade, believe it or not!

As a kid with a Commodore 128 and no access to stores or cash, I printed loads of those things. Also long banners (much to my father's chagrin as he had to provide the ink ribbons and tractor-fed printer paper).

i made so many cards.

and so many "keep out" signs for my bedroom door (with the skull and crossbones clipart and their Thames font because it looked pirate-y)

I used it for cards all the time!

Disagree. Any hand made card is more special. The giver put their time and energy into making it.

Believe it.

We used it extensively in the 80s for birthdays, Christmas cards and more.

Anything made by computer was instantly special, and the ability to customize card to the recipients interests was viewed as magic.

As more of our neighbors and friends got computers, print shop was one of the first programs to be acquired. (Okay, often pirated!)

> but there is no way that anyone would not prefer giving (or receiving) a colorful, professionally printed store-bought one.

Oh boy, you've got a fun education ahead of you today!

See

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

E.g., mom tells a relative I want to make a card on my computer for them, then tells me they'd really like a card made on the computer. Yay, they need my skills to make them a card.

I'm not sure symbolic value includes the joy my mom got from being a kind of P.T. Barnum of my card-printing skills (and card folding-- 2 ply IIRC). But there's that, too.

Anyway, that Wikipedia article will unlock a lot of cool new areas and skins that you can't get without it.

The one kid in my grade in elementary school who actually had an Apple II computer at home did hand out invitations to his birthday party printed with Print Shop. It was the type you would print and then fold the page into 1/4ths. Around 1985/1986.

>I've never believed that people used Print Shop for greeting cards.

as the son of a Print Shop addicted mother through the early 90s, you've believed wrong.

It was pretty empowering for people to be able to customize things. Oddball holidays or festivities that major labels would never touch. Niche topics that were kind of controversial -- it happened at a perfect time when desktop printers became kind of universal and multi-talented.

It's hard to find a "Congratulations on the vasectomy!" card at Hallmark. Print Shop made it not only feasible as a one-off gag, but easy.

Many people would rather give something they made than something they bought. Even if "making" means choosing the fonts and border, it still feels like a labor of love than a simple Hallmark card would.

Especially back when Print Shop was popular. Many folks back then took "hand made" as meaning "special", even if it was "handmade" on a computer. It was the "extra effort" involved as opposed to just buying some generic pre-made thing I think that made it "special" to folks. ;)

The Canva of its time...

No banners with Canva

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