#The print shop 4.0 software#
Much like Print Shop, it could print greeting cards and banners, but the initial version of the software was so close to Print Shop that it could make one do a double-take.
#The print shop 4.0 Pc#
The most notable of these clones was a little ditty called Printmaster, a PC program meant to take advantage of the fact that Brøderbund had only focused on the Commodore 64, the Apple II, and the Apple Macintosh. The fast success of Print Shop led to what you might expect it leading to in the software space during the Reagan era: obvious clones. The Print Shop clone that nearly ruined open source software before it could get off the ground But that was OK for Brøderbund, because kids were the company's target audience-which is why you may remember The Print Shop from middle school.
The Print Shop introduced ideas that desktop publishing soon capitalized on, but it was essentially, in its earliest iteration, a product for kids. It was not something you could lay out a newsletter with, really-it was more a sign-and-banner deal, and that certainly wasn't enough to have Xerox and company shaking in their boots. It would be impractical, however, to create 1,000 sheets of stationery with the program." Simpler patterns, such as letterhead stationery, print faster. "This is not unusual considering the number of dots that must be calculated and printed to create each picture. "Most items require a few minutes to print," InfoWorld's Mark Renne explained in a 1984 review of the Apple II edition of the product. And, partly due to the limited dot-matrix printer technology, it was slow. It had a handful of fonts, a handful of graphics, and a handful of templates.
#The print shop 4.0 professional#
Compared to the desktop publishing programs that soon flooded the professional market, it did very little. That said, while the product was innovative for what it did-particularly in its ease of printing banners, which became common sights in classrooms around the country-it wasn't perfect.
"We thought if we could do that, we could go to the printer manufacturers and they’d be looking for something to sell to people buying printers, and that’s in fact what caused that particular product to take off."Ĭarlston estimated at the time of the 2004 interview that the program made Brøderbund and its later corporate parents $300 million over a 20-year period.Ĭonsider subscribing to our freaking newsletter. Our thought was to get a printer capability, which was an enormous task-you have to think pre-Windows and you had to, essentially, had to write for every single combination of hardware and printer out there and make it work," Carlston recalled in a 2004 workshop at the Computer History Museum. Printers, which used a wide variety of technology varying from daisy wheels to dot-matrix ribbons, worked inconsistently with different computers and the industry was simply not at a point where it could organize around standards.īrøderbund co-founder Doug Carlston said the company saw an opportunity in this complicated scenario. If you had to create a list of the most annoying peripherals one can purchase for a computer in the '80s and '90s, printers and sound cards would most assuredly duke it out for a spot at the top of the list.Īnd to use The Print Shop, of course, you needed a printer. ( Blake Patterson/Flickr) The Print Shop's big challenge: universal compatibility before plug-and-play
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