Hello, its blogging time again and its Valentines Day again. The day we celebrate romance with our significant others with affection, gifts, and other wholesome activities, And what better way to celebrate than to make Valentines Cards.
Now sure you can buy Valentines Day cards from every type of shop imaginable, and of course you can make your own with paper and any art supplies, But lets imagine its 1984, and you got yourself one of these newfangled Apple II's with an Imagewriter printer.
In between playing rounds of Pac-Man and Lode Runner, You've been using the Imagewriter with software like AppleWriter and Visicalc to get some good hard copys of your work. Could you use the ImageWriter to do the same thing for making cards? Maybe signs, banners, and letterheads too? Well now you can!
Enter The Print Shop, Designed by David Balsam and Martin Kahn, And published by Brouderbund Software in 1984, Orignally for the Apple II, with ports for the Commodore 64, Atari 8bit line, IBM PC, and Machintosh following shortly after,
.
When It comes to Software on the Apple II, The Print Shop is one of those programs thats remebered very fondly by those that used it to create banners and cards for all sorts of holidays, gatherings, birthdays and whatever else needed them for a special occasion. However, the program almost didn't allow you to print anything at all!
The Story of The Print Shop began with a simple idea by 2 friends: David Balsam and Martin Kahn. David was a musician turned computer specialist, working as a software specialist and trainer for several computer specialty stores, and Martin was a computer programer and artist, being a graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a double major in mathematics and linguistics, and worked as a graphics programmer. The 2 met at a party at Martin’s house and David was entranced by Martin’s artwork, which hung everywhere. They became good friends and decieded to start a partnership to produce software.
Their idea was to make a peice of software that could allow for the easy creation of grapical messages on the Apple II without any knowledge of computers, and then savethat personallized message to disk to be mailed. They called the Program Special Occasions and began shopping it arround to various publishers.
The problem was nobody wanted to publish it because not enough people had and Apple II to make it vialble enough. Then they decided to pitch it to Doug Carlton, The founder and head of Brouderbund, since Martin had worked with the company previously.
Carlton liked the program, but suggested that they added the ability to print the messages rather than just display them on the screen. It was a bold desicion because at the time, very few people bought computer printers and there were many printers availilible with different drivers. But Cartlon proposed to add the drivers directly in the software by working with the printer manufactures.
David and Martin agreed and after a few ajustments, Special Occasion was renamed The Print Shop and went on sale in 1984, becoming an instant hit on both the Apple II and other platforms. It became so popular that the C64 version was ranked as the most widely pirated Commodore 64 programs of 1985, right behind Activisions Ghostbusters!
But thats enough of a history lesson, Lets get into the program itself. For the full experience, Im using the Online Apple 2TS Emulator as it has full printer support.
Booting the program we are brifly greeted by a title screen before being droped into the main menu giving us our options.
Here we can either make a greating card, a sign, a letterhead, a banner, enter the Screen Magic text superenposer for graphics, the Grapics Editor, and the Setup. First things first configure it, upon going into start up weare given the printer options so of course I'm gonna press Imagewriter. Then it asks you for the driver so ill select Apple Super Serial, configure the printer slot to 1, set disk drives to 2, test the printer, and id say that works so lets save.
Here we can either make a greating card, a sign, a letterhead, a banner, enter the Screen Magic text superenposer for graphics, the Grapics Editor, and the Setup. First things first configure it, upon going into start up weare given the printer options so of course I'm gonna press Imagewriter. Then it asks you for the driver so ill select Apple Super Serial, configure the printer slot to 1, set disk drives to 2, test the printer, and id say that works so lets save.
Allright, so lets print this thing just go to PRINT, Press Return, And youll get this colorfut THINKING message and have the option to pause with escape. The Imagewriter well then bang away at making you card that you can then tear off and fold.
And Sure Enough Here it is! I have to soay that was a pretty easy set up. Granted it is a lot of menu to select, but overall the result are worth it.
.png)
So what happened to The Print Shop? Well the program was follewd up by a companion disk released the next year, the program was followed by The New Print Shop in 1988 for Apple II and MS-DOS, Print Shop Deluxe, for Mac, MS-DOS, and Windows, followed in 1993, with an all new interface,the creation of calendar and a Deluxe Companion whch added new modules and graphics, and the Ensemble version combined The Print Shop, the Companion, and several graphics libraries on one CD. Broderbund continued to sell the program until they merged with The Learning Company in 1998.
But the programs legacy does live on in the hearts of many for not only becoming a killer app, but one that allowed people to enter a computer printing revolution. Thats all Ive got for today, Happy Valentines Day, and as always, Thanks for reading, See you next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment