A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.In the '80s and early '90s GUI-driven computers turned the creation of printed documents into something that could be done in the confines of a home. Today, we call that period the desktop publishing era. It's very important because it for the first time turned the process of publishing into something anyone could do cheaply and professionally.
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But "professionally" is a funny word, and it means different things to different people. For some, simply having access to a couple of fonts outside of what you could get with a typewriter was enough; for others, it was less about creating an impressive design and more about creating a design that was a step above what you could do with a pen and paper.That's where The Print Shop came in handy—in its original form, it was an '80s-tastic program that redefined the parameters of print design into something that could literally be called child's play. Wanna make a greeting card? Follow these instructions, then print on your dot-matrix printer. Need a sign for your lemonade stand? No problem—you can even add a picture of the Easter Bunny on that sign, if you want.It was a bold redefinition of something that once required a whole boatload of specialized equipment. Let's consider the ramifications of the software platform from which a million dot matrix paper banners were born.It was understandable that so many banners were made, honestly, because roughly 10 million copies of The Print Shop were sold by the software publisher Brøderbund between 1984 and 2001, according to a press release by the firm's then-owner, The Learning Company.At the height of its success in the late '80s and early '90s, The Print Shop was Brøderbund's most successful product, selling more than 4 million units by 1992—more than Brøderbund's second-most-popular product at the time, the Carmen Sandiego series. Brøderbund's Myst, which sold 6 million copies in its lifetime, quickly leapfrogged both programs.
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The Print Shop's big challenge: universal compatibility before plug-and-play
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"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. "This is not unusual considering the number of dots that must be calculated and printed to create each picture. Simpler patterns, such as letterhead stationery, print faster. It would be impractical, however, to create 1,000 sheets of stationery with the program."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. But what came next certainly would.The Print Shop introduced ideas that desktop publishing soon capitalized on, but it was essentially, in its earliest iteration, a product for kids. 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.
— A 2010 press release from Encore Software, announcing the then-latest iteration of The Print Shop, which was being thrown on the stage at an unusually square part of the Consumer Electronics Show. As you might imagine based on this quote, a lot has changed with The Print Shop since its '80s heyday. The software is a lot more capable than it was back then—it's no Photoshop, but it was never trying to be—but the software is in this weird niche where it's almost too basic for kids, so they have to sell it to moms."Given the enormous popularity of our product with moms across America, we are thrilled to launch the newest version of our flagship product The Print Shop 2.0® at CES' Mommy Tech Summit."
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The Print Shop clone that nearly ruined open source software before it could get off the ground
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That legal decision, which Brøderbund won, noted that there appeared to be a number of areas in which the programmers directly ripped off The Print Shop wholesale. One particularly damning point highlighted by the suit notes that in one part of the app, Printmaster tells users to press the "Return" key, rather than the "Enter" key as was the convention on IBM PCs. David Lodge, Unison's product manager, admitted during the trial that this was straight-up copying on the part of the company.
"Lodge admitted that Unison's failure to change 'Return' to 'Enter' was a result of its programmers' intense concentration on copying 'Print Shop,'" the decision stated.The lawsuit was successful for Brøderbund, and led to significant changes with Printmaster (which, oddly enough, Brøderbund later published) but it raised serious long-term questions for the software industry, which had relied on clones to help distribute different kinds of software between platforms. During this time frame, look-and-feel issues were becoming a significant point of contention for software companies—see these comments by Steve Jobs made about Windows in 2005—and this case had the potential to shut the door for software that directly copied interface elements.The federal court decision, made in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, had the potential to stop software clones in their tracks. It also potentially could have threatened the creation of open-source software that came after the 1987 court decision, by implying that individual screens could be copyrighted.
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Much of the software we use today borrows look-and-feel elements from other pieces of software—and that could have led to some uncomfortable legal decisions that hurt the broader software industry, particularly with open-source software clones.In fact, not long after the court decision, Lotus 1-2-3's parent company attempted to copyright its dialog screens, but failed. As the St. John's Law Review noted in 1990, a separate case found nearly the opposite result on this issue. This led the Copyright Office to weigh in—and they said you can't copyright individual screens."In response to these conflicting holdings, the Copyright Office issued a notice stating that all copyrightable expression, including screen displays embodied in a computer program and owned by the same claimant, is to be considered a single work and, therefore, should be registered on a single application form," the Law Review article stated.Considering what came after—specifically, Linux, and the philosophy it inspired—did we dodge a bullet in this case?
— Adrienne LaFrance, a staff writer for The Atlantic, arguing that The Print Shop's graphics were an early form of emoji. Interestingly, it ties into something briefly touched upon in the Broderbund Software Inc. v. Unison World, Inc.decision. See, The Print Shop wasn't a printing app at first; it started out as Perfect Occasion. While it used the graphics that The Print Shop became famous for, in instead called on people to give friends birthday cards in the form of computer disks. Doug Carlston recalled that when he was first shown the software, it was an interesting gimmick. "And so you'd send the disk to somebody, they'd stick it in, and if they had a computer on at the right time it would pop up," Carlston told the Computer History Museum. If you think about it, it's not too far off from how emojis are used now—except you had to use the mail back then, rather than the internet."Looking back, the relative lack of variety notwithstanding, The Print Shop's image library wasn't so different conceptually than today's emoji. In my estimation, with the help of the Internet Archive's emulated version of The Print Shop's 1984 edition, about 80 percent of the collection of graphics from back in the day has a modern emoji equivalent."
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