How I invented Desktop Publishing

70s Typesetting

Your tale of the woes of typesetting before 1980 does not sound familiar to me.

Back in the 70s my father's factory had a typesetting computer that produced the type on photo paper without any of the SGML, paper tape or delays that you mention. I remember it well because I used to play games on it but I can't remember the make or model.

It was about the size of a large desk with keyboard, green screen monitor, dual 5.25" floppies, photo paper 'printer' and it took a kind of optical disk inside for the different type faces. You could see the characters on the optical disk if you held it up to a light and the computer would not start without one. Prior to this we had a similar computer with dual cassette tapes for backup.

A fast compositor like my sister could produce the type for a magazine article in ten minutes and, since it was saved to floppy, if there were any changes required then they could be made and new type produced almost instantly. Nothing like the delays you mention.

This system was top of the range when we bought it and produced clean, crisp type in hundreds of type faces. We used it to create the type for printing everything from letterheads to magazines including Practical Camping, Practical Caravan and Wines and Spirits.

When I was a kid

I pretended my kiddies paintbox was a computer with the colour squares as keys and the lid as a screen. I got dirty fingers.

Then years later, I guess someone copied my idea, I saw we had laptops.

I'm responsible for netbooks y'know!

You invented DTP?

So you're responsible for a million badly spelt posters and adverts from muppets with the design skills of a neanderthal :-(

ahh, them wuz the days

I graduated college in 1979 (late Paleolithic) with a major in Illustration And Design, and for the first six or seven years of my career I did layout the old-fashioned way -- with hot wax, razor blades, Pres-Type, Zip-A-Tone, Rapidograph pens, shape templates, border tape, and "cold galleys".

In the mid '80s, I had the privilege of working in one of the first design studios to use MacOS-based design/graphics and layout systems: a 512k Mac with a HyperDrive, a ThunderScan (remember that damn' thing?) and a v.23 LaserWriter in early '85. For the first year and a half I was there, though, the only computer we had was an old CompuGraphic 7500 system, whose interface could be best described as being like WordPerfect, only clumsier. Typefaces were stored not on disks, but on strips of thick plastic film, one family to a strip, which needed to be manually installed and changed out depending on the typefaces we wanted to use for a job. Typesetting jobs in progress were saved on 7" floppies. Its UI was text-based and extremely clunky, and it output cold galleys on a separate self-contained three-tank developing setup. Ironically, the CG7500 was the same system used to set type at the shop which printed my old high-school newspaper in the mid '70s, and was already several years out of production by the time I learned to use it in '84; in fact, the one in our studio was allegedly one of the last 7500s which still had an active service contract with CompuGraphic at the time.

We got the 512k Mac for our studio in early '85 after one of the art directors and her husband bought one for their home after doing one of the famous Apple "test drives". I wasn't halfway through the Guided Tour before I saw the writing on the wall for the future of my career; I never did finish the Guided Tour before diving headlong into MacPaint, MacDraw, MacWrite and ThunderScan, and damn' near pissed my pants as I watched the time needed to lay out a proposal or brochure go from days to a single morning. It was maybe a month, tops, before we were at the point where we could lay out an entire document on the Mac with MacWrite and MacDraw, using elements created in MacDraw, MacPaint and ThunderScan -- I quickly figured out how to scan fotos at 400% and "snap" them down to final repro size, compressing bitmap pixels to get a very pleasing rotogravure effect -- and then sat back and watched proposal managers and clients scratching their heads at our total lack of aggrevated reactions as they came in with changes needed ASAP.

Mind you, we were still totally winging it and hacking it at the time as the first version of PageMaker wouldn't ship until later that year, and the first high-res imagesetting systems wouldn't ship for another two years -- final layouts from the LaserWriter still had to be pasted onto "flats" and photographed onto neg film on a traditional copy camera for imaging on a traditional platemaker -- but, still, we couldn't contain our glee as our MacOS DTP setup eliminated 95% percent of our design and production headaches practically overnight.

A cold one for Mr. Eicher for being one of the unsung pioneers of digital design and publishing.

Schmucktard Deluxe

My Commodore64 had some sort of extended ASCII for border characters, and moveable sprites. And there were 300 baud modems for transport. In fact, the local radio station broadcast Centipede on the radio so you could tape the program and play it into your box. Broadcasting is publishing too.

Adobe fell victim to Apple early. Poor PostScript2.

I can still remember leaving Apple for PC because Apple couldn't handle multi-vendor extentions. The PC guy got the shaft while a generation of academia paid twice the price for infrastructure and got stuck with Lotus Notes.

Hehe "The Newsroom" and Beagle Bros.

I had forgotten them!

Apple ][ - from the days when computers were fun.

... and to all the haters, I think "I invented DTP" is just a hook line for a history article, rather than a serious attempt to claim to be the originator of the concept.

What about...

roff, nroff, TeX, LaTeX, and other WYMIWYG (What You MEAN Is What You Get) typesetting "languages? [La]TeX produces some of the most beautiful output available, especially since it was modified to use PostScript Type 1 fonts. There are other derivatives for specific disciplines. Run on Macs, PC's. Old minicomputerrs salvaged from the junk pile, Linux, Solaris, Netbooks, Notebooks, mainframes or anything else that allows the source to be compiled even if it means cross-compiling.

The input can be prepared on any editor - even Notepad or the notepad clone on my Crackberry.

BTW, you can include Photoshop images (heck, any kind of image).

I did use PageMaker 1.0 on the original Macintosh a lot, so I'm not unfamiliar with that world, I just prefer a system where I can separate the "look" from whatever it is I'm trying to say.

"Maybe it was Todd Rundgren. "

"Maybe it was Todd Rundgren. "

Is that cpmment in particular, and maybe the article in general, what passes for irony in the mid-West? Todd did invent some smart stuff, including some multimedia stuff, and make the odd record or three over the years (calling him a "rock music producer" is a bit of an understatement, though he was quite good at that in his own way) but in the last 35 years (roughly since I saw his 1975 gig at the Liverpool Empire) I don't remember ever seeing anything claiming he invented (or was connected to) DTP.

Whoever did invent DTP for the masses should be shot (posthumously if necessary) for starting the "presentation trumps content" fashion which has in due course resulted in so much wasted time (and indeed in so many lost lives - yes I'm serious, start with http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OB and progress in due course to the Haddon-Cave inquiry into the Nimrod crash in Afghanistan, an inquiry report which for some strange reason Lewis has so far completely ignored even though it has, unusually, actually named names and resulted in arrests - but maybe not yet charges, anybody know?).

Uh?

What about Xerox PARC's stuff like the Alto and the software that ran on it? Sure, the Alto wasn't a small desktop microcomputer, but all the elements were there including the laser printing which defined the "professional" DTP market on the Mac in the decade following.

Vector-Raster 1980

I was using a Versatronic vector to raster graphic systems since at least 1980. It may well have been around before then. It was driven by Data General minis but obviously the package was availabe for DEC etc. The vector to raster was as upmarket as any modern graphics system and included splines and most of the elements in postscript but without the interpreter. Resolution was nearly as good as a modern photo-typesetter. In about 1983 I developed a hack so that high class graphics input could be rendered cheaply on dot matrix printers.

For me desktop publishing came via postscript. It was really easy - and quicker - t o write programs in Postscript and execute them on an LN03. After Postscript I loved Venture Publisher even more - as a techie and producer of computer generated manuals it was ideal. You could do so much automated stuff with it by use of style sheets and generation of the content by other processes.

I've yet to find another package that lets me do the same thing as easily. Every other package I've seen with the word 'publisher' is inflexible and/or crashes a lot.

1972

It was 1972.

I had just leased a machine from HP, the 9830A. You can see the specs on the HpMuseum.org web site.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9830.htm

I was studying law at the time and knew I would need to have it do word processing. Perhaps not DTP as it became known but rather an automatic typewriter.

It came with the BASIC programming language and nothing more. Oh, and I got the extra string ROM. Not knowing any better I wrote my own word processing application that had global search and replace, spell checking and an unlimited document size. HP also sold a Facit typewriter with a whole bunch of solenoids for LQP (letter quality print).

It took a well to develop the application but by the time I started to practice law in 1974 it was fully developed. And HP at the time fully supported their system with office calls and the whole bit. At the time IBM only had their MTST machine. It could only print duplicates of what you had typed earlier. And Xerox was just coming out with their machine.

One day my legal secretary went to a product demo for Xerox. After that demo she asked the Xerox guy how to do spell checking and global search and replace. The Xerox salesman told her that no machine did that. So she went back to work in my law office that afternoon totally unimpressed.

When did the Apple I come out? And the IBM PC? Even Wordstar?

If you check the HPMuseum website you will see that the HP 9839A also offered a hard disc (sharable between 4 systems). That was not a toy. It was not until years later that it hooked up to the early spinwriters as they were called. I even remember seeing a Diablo spinwriter prototype. It was twice as fast as the Facit. It was only about 15 cps.

Just shows what a lawyer can do when you do not know any better.

I also wrote a very complete Tax Analysis application. It would spit out some 90 tax return abstracts in order to analysis real estate investments. Oh, and I wrote the accounting applications for my law office as well. Again, I never knew that shrink wrapped software may someday be available for office applications. Of course, they never were for that early machine anyway.

That HP machine also was available with a 250 LPM thermal printer. It only printed in upper case. But, it was very fast and quiet. It was not bested for rough drafts until the laser printers came out. First from HP of course. 250 LPM is almost instant.

But then that was 1972 hardware.