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Comment by sufehmi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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