- 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).
I think they were bought by Corel
Edit: Serif are in the article, sorry
Corel licensed their software for a while and released it as CorelXARA.
Cerilica (company name) Truism (product name).
There was also Composition, by a chap from New Zealand. Multiple transparent layers of any size and position, and and interesting system-wide plugin system.
Serif (makers of Affinity suite) were bought by Canva last year. So far, they’ve honored their perpetual licenses and still offer them, but it seems like a perilous proposition given Canva’s audience and sales model.
EDIT: but Create was more a drawing program than page layout.
But I never heard if it ever made it to market or with what feature set.
I dislike what Adobe has become with its CC crap, but InDesign was a masterpiece of software. (I say "was" as I stopped doing page/graphic design 15 years ago, and unfamiliar with today's offerings).
If only you had said sad Mac
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...
There was a similarly named program originally known in the UK as Timeworks Publisher. GEM-based though, hmm.
I also used GeoPublish, because Commodore! It was fantastic on the C64.
Former CEO of GeoWorks claims that GEOS faded away "because Microsoft threatened to withdraw supply of MS-DOS to hardware manufacturers who bundled Geoworks with their machines".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)
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.
Essentially it work like a light pen, but it used a mesh that was, somehow, affixed to the screen.
We had a Victor 9000 connected to a plotter along with very early AutoCAD. I also think we had another digitizer connected as well.
A very cool application was one of the engineers was using that along with AutoCAD to digitize aircraft from photocopies out of Jane’s books. He was using the data to calculate radar cross sections of the different airplanes.
Just a bunch of lines in the screen, he just wanted the points. Thought that was pretty clever.
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....
Annoying company.
When Indesign came along people were almost gleeful to jump ship
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.
Some portions of UniQorn lived on in Softpress Freeway web design app that was on shelves in boxes in Apple stores for many years.
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.
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.
taeric•9h ago
rbanffy•8h ago
We have to cut some slack for the titles from platforms that died - it wasn’t completely their fault at least.
taeric•8h ago
com2kid•7h ago
I remember as a kid that making personalized greeting cards was just what you did. I had a computer, I had a color printer, every holiday was getting a unique card! Family events had giant banners that I spend hours taping together. One year I did a space themed banner (I use a "space image" generation program that did stars and nebulas and such) and then realized my mistake when it took forever to print out 15+ sheets of paper with a solid black background (oops).
Nowadays I don't even own a color printer (black and white laser), and I haven't tried making custom cards in forever.
IMHO it is just one more example of how PCs have become content consumption devices rather than outlets for creation.
tpmoney•6h ago
I would argue it’s more of an example of a part of an industry dying because the reality never lived up to the expectations and the individual costs being prohibitive to getting there. As the artwork computers were cable of got better, we weren’t as happy with the quality of image you get from standard printer paper and an inkjet. The difference between photo paper and regular paper in the same printer is night and day, but most people never saw that and most people didn’t want to spend the money that photo paper cost for printing out a single birthday card. Especially when it’s was a 50/50 crapshoot whether your print heads were clogged or would clog half way through and ruin the first print. Add into that the cost of all the ink that was wasted to clean the print heads and the chance that you would just plain be out of a color and unable to print anyway and I think most people just decided the aggravation wasn’t worth the novelty of Clip Art Dog #23 telling you happy birthday.
And then once the internet really took off, who wanted to give a clip art card printed on printer paper when you could send someone a “jibjab” custom e-card with funny animations of your faces?
com2kid•5h ago
It was however dog slow.
I am not sure why modern inkjets need print head cleaning whereas old ones did not.
Spooky23•5h ago
paradox460•3h ago