A Tongue-in-Cheek Look Back at Broderbund's 'The Print Shop' (2021) | Hacker News Reader

A Tongue-in-Cheek Look Back at Broderbund's 'The Print Shop' (2021)

theprintshop.club

64 pointsmikerg8738 comments

I had print shop as a 10-15 year old and made all my own and many of my families birthday, anniversary and Christmas cards with it. I was the "computer guy" in my household and was therefore entrusted with this duty. I also printed advertisements for lawn mowing services, jewelry my brother and I made and sold in consignment shops, lost dogs for neighbors, playbills, schedules, wedding invitations. All printed on a dot matrix printer.

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.

If you weren't around during this era, it's absolutely impossible to understand what a killer app Print Shop was.

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.

For those interested in PrintMaster (often dismissed as a PrintShop copycat, though I disagree with this) there are preserved examples on:

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

One of the most useful pieces of software of all time. You couldn't go far without seeing a mini banner made in Print Shop.

With a dot matrix printer!

I remember playing around with Print Shop Deluxe on my parent's PC in the early 90s. I don't recall the hardware, but it may have been either an XT clone or a 286/386. I was too young to remember what it was.

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:

https://winworldpc.com/product/the-print-shop/deluxe-win

Loved The Print Shop but was an even bigger fan of The Newsroom, which I used in elementary school to publish an underground gossip rag with a circulation of dozens. Dozens!

Many user group newsletters came out of The Newsroom. It was my first experience with newsletters too.

We had this in our elementary school lab in the mid 80's, I remember every other boy using this to print something along the lines of "No girls allowed" to put on their bedroom doors.

Print Shop is what we used in my 1994 elementary school "special topics" class to do the student newspaper. One of the factoids was like, "the world record for balancing golf balls on top of each other is 8" and the person making that part of the paper inserted and visually stacked all 8 golf balls, and I remember thinking, "this is so cool!"

What a world!

At the time the computer store I worked for sold countless copies of Print Shop. We also had a service at our store where we would lay out and print banners for people. I think it was one of the first tools that got people to consider their PC could be used for more than word processing... that practical graphics were in reach of the average home user.

    I think it was one of the first tools that 
    got people to consider their PC could be used 
    for more than word processing

Absolutely. I maintain that it did more than any other app to promote the idea of home computing during those early days.

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 burned out my Epson 9 pin dot matrix printer using this program on Apple ][+ back in the day (literally worked the poor thing to death), and had to upgrade to a 24 pin Epson compatible printer (made by "Star") that ended up bein' worth every thin dime. Burned out a 9 cent (at the local Radio Shack) heat-sink transistor in that printer runnin' it during a thunderstorm to finish up a big print job I needed done before morning. Fun times! Ah, the nostalgia... :)

Whoa. People remember this thing.

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!

> sitting in McDonald’s eating your Big Mac alone, plotting your revenge against Hallmark for engineering the single greatest extortion racket in the history of rackets

Having sent off a rediculous number of stamped Christmas cards last week, I can completely empathize!

The humor doesn't quite hit - it feels a little over-aggressive and not clever, but the details in the article are accurate and well organized.

Maybe it's not obvious that this site actually contains an emulated version of The Print Shop on its homepage https://theprintshop.club It includes an emulated printer that prints to a PDF, so you can even print the produced artifact on a 21th century printer.

I had The Print Shop Deluxe and remember thinking it was the future, and that we woull all be making our own holiday cards, signs, etc. in no time. Every holiday, I'm amazed that everyone I know (including me) is now back to using store-bought cards. I was surprised to just find out that there is a modern version, though it is Windows-only.

I remember the Print Shop as a kid! Yah I guess specialization won out. We don't even have to see our holiday cards now. Upload a photoshopped picture and mail merge and start getting compliments from friends and family a week later.

I wonder how much of this is due to the annoyances of owning a printer.

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.

Probably a huge factor. Its just a pain in the ass to occasionally print something. In the 90s we actually printed a lot more stuff. We printed maps, letters to mail, forms to fill out. Everything that was typed for school would be printed and turned in. I would print excerpts from groliers to read later. I printed recipes for my parents. So printing cards etc made sense because the printer was so frequently in use. I actually printed a few things this Christmas and it was annoying, required multiple reboots of the printer, a paper jam and a new warning message.

Get a laser printer. A color laser printer should eventually be cheaper, especially if you use third party toner.

Yeah I love my laser printer. Actually earlier this year I bought an ink tank printer because I've had to print a number of things in color and have been really pleased with that.

But it's very difficult to beat the cost of a laser printer, especially for infrequent prints.

If you did want to take another stab at home printmaking, buy an Epson.

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.

> 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.

You can make your own cards with online services now. I've used Greetings Island many, many times to make custom cards. They have many perfectly good templates you can use for free. You can just print them out on a color laser printer after saving as PDF.

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.

Print Shop will forever remain burned in my memory of that era along with Zork, Wizardry and Bank Street Writer.

Try it out at https://archive.org/details/The_Print_Shop_1984_Broderbund , on an emulated Apple 2e.

ha I used to love Print Shop on our Apple ][ clone. I can still hear my (dad's) old 80s tractor-fed dot matrix buzzing out whatever my young mind thought up. Signs for my bedroom door and breakfast in bed menus as examples.

Woah! Print shop and PrintMaster was awesome on IBM AT with EGA or, maybe VGA (I don't remember exactly). I remember I was selling prints in my school back then.

I used to use this program when I was young. Then I lost one of the art disks and started using it less out of disappointment.

The Print Shop and Bannermania have been extremely popular in Turkey in the 80’s and 90’s.

Yeah, I could be wrong, but wasn't there one called just "Banner"? It would leverage the matrix printer's chained paper, and print the multi-page banners all the way through. I've never had such an experience anymore when laser printers emerged, and I had to cut margins off and tape the pieces awkwardly together.

Yes, everyone called it Banner probably because it was the name of the executable, but the software was named Bannermania, IIRC. I don’t remember two different banner apps.

The Print Shop is one of the first pieces of software I ever used. I was nine years old. My parents had bought me a used Apple IIe and dot matrix printer. Included were ~200 5.25" floppy disks containing random software, many of them games. I ended up using The Print Shop more than anything else (except Dig Dug). It was very user friendly. I still have vivid and fond memories of the printer whining away late at night, slowly spewing out my graphical creations. Many thanks to the developers!

Sooo many thank-you notes written with this software during my childhood.

Mostly unrelated but did anyone else use FlamingText.com in the early 2000s?

Brøderbund. Now there’s a name I haven’t seen in decades. Thanks for the blast from the past!

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