![]() The answer Prefis believes is that there are many authors of technical and educational material who would prefer to format and arrange their own material. So who will use the Book Machine? It is after all a do-it-yourself composition system and most authors restrict their role to writing and leave composition to printers. In a 1984 piece in the FID News Bulletin, the outlet tried to make sense of who the audience might be for such a tool, and came up with this: Not cheap, especially for a machine dedicated to typesetting. At the time, it went for £5,980, roughly $8,000 based on exchange rates of the time-and £17,363 today ($19,129). It was ambitious, but you very much paid for that ambition. It produced disks capable of managing phototypesetting tools without needing any additional steps, meaning its use case was working with existing phototypesetting technology rather than its own separate thing like many DTP tools of the era were. One of the earliest examples of a computer built around typesetting, this machine, produced by Prefis, could capably set type on a page at sizes between 6 points and 48 points, in a variety of forms-including paragraph and headline sizes. Platform: Dedicated machine based on Sirius microcomputer If it’s good enough an argument for Ken Shirriff, it’s good enough for me.Īn example of The Book Machine, as shown in a 1983 issue of Practical Computing. “Of course, Steve Jobs deserves great credit for making desktop publishing common and affordable with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter, something Xerox failed to do with the Xerox Star, an expensive ($75,000) system that commercialized the Alto’s technology.” “The Macintosh owes everything from the WYSIWYG editor and spline-based fonts to the bitmapped display and laser printer to the Xerox Alto,” Shirriff wrote on his blog in 2017. First, one only has to point to Xerox’s legacy in copiers and printers as being compatible with the needs of a publisher.Īdditionally, computer historians who have researched this stuff in-depth, such as Ken Shirriff, have convincingly made the argument that the Alto represented a desktop publishing platform before desktop publishing was given that name, citing the fact that the handbook for the computer was actually laid out using the computer, the Alto’s typography capabilities, and that the publishing tools were commercialized, albeit poorly. Looking at the Xerox Alto, the computer that inspired Apple to create the Macintosh, as a machine that could be used to lay out and publish things might to some degree fudge the “desktop publishing” definition for some, but the case for it is pretty strong. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. This one is likely going to be controversial with someone, which I fully admit is true. Platform: Groundbreaking-but-failed computer platform that inspired the GUI-based world in which we live (Oh yeah, quick reminder of what makes things obscure, from our point of view.) - Ernie Tedium So in a continuation of our list of things that didn’t make it, Today’s Tedium takes a look at 10 early examples of desktop publishing software that you probably don’t remember desktop publishing was a killer app nearly 40 years ago and you were in diapers back then … if you existed at all. And while we’ve landed on a few standards, a lot of desktop publishing tools failed to make to it the present day. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single day. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. ![]() Today in Tedium: It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s.
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