@NanoRaptor I think a lot of people viewing this ad would assume it had been composed in a desktop publishing system - but those were uncommon until after the release of the first Macintosh.
Any idea what was used for producing these ads in the early 1980s?
@royal this one’s from 1986 and it’s possible there was a mac in the background setting text, but while restoring other pages in the same brochure I’m finding not everything lines up 100% across a page - so I’d say there’s some physical paste-up going on as well, though it’s possible that’s a side effect of scanning.
It’s a good while before my print knowledge, I’m an early all-digital op, but not that early!
I recall seeing my high school yearbook teacher circa 1989 composing on an IBM PC, printing plain text on a dot matrix printer, then pasting it along with photos onto a board vaguely like a modern cutting board with lines and grids (but posterboard).
Likely the yearbook company (Jostens??) re-flowed the text for him. I think the dot matrix printouts were just included, not actually pasted. But that's going on old memories of casual observations; I wasn't on the yearbook yet
I have a hundred zip disk backups from a print shop, of all their files from the early 90s through to very early 2000s.
It's neat seeing early jobs as just a slab of text sent out for text to be pasted up, or maybe a single scanned image - and over time more and more of the complete job was done digitally. Soon enough 1997 onwards there were many all-digital jobs in QuarkXPress
@NanoRaptor@RL_Dane For a few weeks I worked on PageMaker on Windows 2.11 (yes, 2 not 3). For our purposes PageMaker was the "killer app" that required a very early version of Windows.
I'm remembering a mid-90s #MacWorld article talking about the difficulty of doing all-digital layout at the time -- their photos were something like 20MB per page!
@RL_Dane@royal That's the one issue of Macworld I bought before becoming a Mac user. I was this close to buying one of the LCs instead of another Amiga. Practically memorised the issue!
Hah! And I was just wondering what would've happened if I had gotten an A500 instead of a MacSE for Christmas 1989 (https://fosstodon.org/)
I need to find magazine ads for the A500 and related hardware on archive dot org. I want to explore it via emulation, as I've never used the @Amiga for more than a few minutes at a time before.
@RL_Dane Good example of pro users (early DTP in this case) challenging the capabilities of available hardware. It seems DTP drove Mac design much as video production and games drove the Amiga, and super-exciting spreadsheets drove IBM clones.
Yeah, tangential to that, I remember the mid90's excitement when the new Quadra machines could display 30fps 320x240 QT videos doubled to full-screen 640x480. ;)
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