HN Reader

A few which weren't listed:

- Calamus --- a German tool based on a document model, it was pretty interesting

- Ready-Set-Go --- this was a contender, with a quite vocal fanbase

- Microsoft Publisher --- this was just announced as development ceasing

and the cool British program which did ink mixing and took paper characteristics into account whose name I can't recall.... (and was hoping would be listed)

Kind of silly to list PageMaker, since its successor, K2 became InDesign (which was so promising, Adobe bought Aldus), and Serif Page Plus, since Serif now publishes their Publisher application (fortuitous name choice for them).

Reminds me of printing cards at home. Reading, I almost skipped over where this referenced Print Shop, as I didn't recognize the name. Their article for that, https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/, is ridiculously nostalgic. I think I can hear that main banner printing.

I had an Amiga in high school when my neighbor ahem loaned me his PageSetter disks. It was hard to use in places, and it surely crashed a lot, but I got great grades on the homework I created in it, which often looked nicer than what the school newspaper was able to pull off.

DTP probably doesn't seem like that big of a deal to anyone today outside of a publishing house. It was freaking amazing at the time. Me, some dumb kid with an off the shelf computer, could make reasonably professional (if not exactly elegant) documents just like the news and print people? It seemed unthinkable.

This takes me back. It's missing Quark XPress.

Around that time I was dating a typesetter who did DTP as well, and I got into the game and did gigs using Quark, Ventura Publisher, and Pagemaker. Good times!

Amusingly enough, Word 4.0 on the Mac had enough layout capabilities to do a lot of basic publishing needs.

All these many years later I can ace those online kerning tests....

I was hoping to find a Mac program we used to have called ReadySetGo by Letraset. It was a surprisingly capable DTP program published by a company known for its dry transfer lettering sheets. I wonder if anyone else remembers it!

My family must have bought it because they used to run a very small town newspaper, but I guess maybe given that they didn't own a LaserWriter, just an ImageWriter, and didn't have a pathway to get whole laid-out pages of the newspaper to the printer digitally, they decided it was better to just keep using MacWrite, write everything in a narrow column width, print it out on the ImageWriter, and cut it up to lay out the newspaper on big sheets of paper.

PageMaker was enormously popular in the 80s/90s. It was everywhere. I remember writing two different sets of computer manuals with it.

I also used GeoPublish, because Commodore! It was fantastic on the C64.

I rarely see mention of UniQorn, a DTP app based on Apple's short-lived QuickDraw GX graphics engine.

Some portions of UniQorn lived on in Softpress Freeway web design app that was on shelves in boxes in Apple stores for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_(software)

"5. The Newsroom. Platform: Apple II, IBM PC"

shows a distinctly c64-looking splash screen

Wikipedia says it was for Apple ][, MS-DOS, C64, and Atari 8-bits. The first two came out in 1984, the c64 and Atari ports followed in 1985/7.

anyway, now I'm having flashbacks to meticulously pushing pixels in The Print Shop to make an image of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs to use in greeting cards and tractor-feed banners.

PFS:First Publisher was my fav for a while in the 80s on a clone 8086 PC with CGA (running in mono 640x200). Very impressive performance for the time.

It supported loading MacPaint bitmaps (.mac on the PC) and with the “cheap” PC compatibles it made for a poor man’s Mac-workalike DTP tool.

Here’s an 1988 article on the T/Maker company that built it, founded by Heidi Roizen and her brother Peter Roizen:

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/tmaker-tiny-so...

The "Sirius microcomputer" pictured as "The Book Machine" is in fact a Victor 9000, as you can see in the picture. The same unit was branded as "Sirius" in Europe and as "Victor 9000" in the U.S.

I spent quite a lot of time with the Victor 9000 in 1983-1985, as my college bought a bunch of them, and I was the student computer lab guy who supported them. It was a fascinating machine with some really cool specs: built-in 800x600 pixel monochrome graphics, redefinable keyboard and character set layouts, built-in serial and parallel ports, high-density floppy drives, and an 8086 processor. It ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS. Its closest competitor was the original IBM PC, which at that time had low-density floppies, no graphics, no built-in ports, etc.

The downfall of the Victor 9000 was that it pre-dated the rise of the "PC-clone": third-party PCs that could run exactly the same shrink-wrapped software as the IBM PC did. In the CP/M-80 8-bit world, every manufacturer had its own disk formats, screen sizes, and so on, and you had to buy shrink-wrapped software for your own specific hardware, and the Victor-9000 folks assumed that the 16-bit world would work the same way. As a result, they produced a much better machine than the IBM PC...that wasn't fully compatible.

Interleaf rose and fell spectacularly. Writing the entire user interface code in Common Lisp was an interesting feature.

This missed one of the most badly named applications ever made: "Publish It!" It wasn't bad for an Apple II program, but say the name out loud to see why it's not a surprise that it is lost to history.

PageMaker was awesome -- and ultimately transformed into InDesign which is excellent.

My father set up a Ventura Publisher-based publishing shop in the 80s and it was great. I got to use a laser printer for the first time, retouch photos with Corel Paint and play around with GEM, which I remember had an extremely smooth mouse pointer. All in glorious high resolution (720x348) gray scale.

Aldus PageMaker is considered a failure! I thought it was neck-in-neck competition with QuarkXPress. I was good with PageMaker. Well, I can make it sing.

PageMaker and CorelDRAW paid for my high school and college education, and almost all of my earnings at that time. I wanted to try QuarkXPress, but I had never seen a Mac before I moved away from my hometown.

I've got a bunch of artistic side projects and regularly need DTP.

I switched to Linux a few years back, and pretty much the last remaining pain point is DTP software. Is there anything out there in the FOSS world at a similar level to Affinity? I'm yet to find anything.

I know there are approaches through Wine, but a native solution would be ideal.

TIL that Serif (publisher of the Affinity suite, now owned by Canva) has been around since the 90s!

Well I learned that FrameMaker still lives! Takes me back to a past life. Who uses it now?

Surprised to see lighthouse designs software or STONEworks didn't make the cut. I realize the list stops in the early 90s, but both of these tools were rather significant if you used NeXT or early versions of Mac OS X. Hell, Diagram! lives on today as OmniGraffle, which is my favorite diagramming tool still