Corey Kosak here. A friend told me this was trending on Hacker News. Ask me anything LOL. Many of the people mentioned in the article are still around so I'll let them know this is happening. :-)
Thanks for Print Shop! I made tons of banners and cards with my C64 in the '80s. :-)
Were you also involved in making Music Shop? I loved that program as well, and I can still hum some of the tunes that were included with it, like Kajun Klog, Oogie Boogie and the various arrangements of classical repertoire.
Awesome, no I didn't really have any involvement with Music Shop. And (see above) I can only take credit for your banners and cards if you had the Commodore 801 printer :-)
Thank you for the kind words. But I can't take any credit for the creativity behind the product. My role was doing a variety of ports: the Commodore 64 version "side B" (side B of the floppy which had its own set of graphics and fonts that were redrawn to match the scale of the idiosyncratic Commodore printer... was it the 801?) Also the Atari 400/800 port (I ran out of RAM so I decided get rid of Atari DOS and instead write a mini file system sufficient to write save files to the Atari Drive (model 810 I think). The things people let you get away with when you're a teenager... And then the Apple //gs version which was a total rewrite from the ground up and had a variety of new stuff in it.
The credit is due to David and Marty but there's also an interesting backstory. As I understand it, the prototype that David & Marty first brought to Br0derbund was a "Greeting Disk". As in "Wouldn't it be fun for people to be able to make a dynamic, custom greeting disk that they can give to their friends to boot on their computer?" A great idea really, but perhaps a little ahead of its time. I believe it was Br0derbund's Richard Whittaker who first suggested to them "how about printing instead?"
I just remembered... I think my greatest contribution was in the field of """user experience""" for the Atari 400/800. For printing we had to figure out which way users had their "auto line feed" DIP switch set on their printer. I felt like it would be rather off-putting to ask the user something so technical during setup while they're just trying to get going. So my big idea was to print a big V (like \/) then a carriage return and then an inverted V (like /\). Then the program would ask them whether they saw a diamond or a squiggle on their printer.
Yeah, Richard W. suggested adding a print function to our original demo (called Perfect Occasion). I ran with that and started designing an interface for printed cards. Marty was the wiz who came up with the idea of not just doing a "screen dump" to the printer, but using the highest native resolution of each dot matrix printer currently on the market to make the printouts look "sharp". The original code for Perfect Occasion became the "Screen Magic" option in Print Shop.
That's so cool, I don't remember hearing that. Probably because I got involved a bit later, when PS was nearly complete. I did work with Richard W quite a bit back then. I thought it was cool how Marty stored the color graphics in the later version as separate bit planes CMYK.. or was it just CMY? Fun stuff writing graphic editors for the IIGS version that used that same format where nowadays bitmaps are interleaved. Optimizing the editors for this peculiarity was a fun challenge back then.
With the IIGS version we ended up using only the mouse pointer and ProDOS from the system and inventing our own GUI. Fun times. And writing our own printer and i/o card drivers, what were we thinking!? Well, those were the "don't trust any code you didn't write yourself" days. I still feel that way to certain extent and it makes for longer lasting code.
Chiming in with many others here. When I was 3 my mom would take me into her office on occasional weekends and she managed to get me to memorize enough to open The Print Shop. From there I could print all sorts of dinosaurs and interesting things to a dot matrix printer, and then color as much as I wanted. It connected tech to me as a tool to reach for at a very young age. I definitely would have had a very different route into tech later if I even had one. Thank you all!
As a fellow Ivy Leaguer, is it fair to say that getting recommendation letters written by two Harvard College grads who had made it big helped in getting in when you finally decided to get the degree?
Not many people can say that they helped bring about a social and technological revolution with their work. You can (And the Porsche wasn't a bad reward, either!).
I don't know everything that goes on in the minds of college admissions officers, but I don't think alumni recommendation letters matter very much to them. For me what worked I assume (and this was 35+ years ago, mind you) is having great test scores, starting college four years late, and having what perhaps looked like an entrepreneurial spirit. So I had elements of my background that seemed unusual / interesting and that may have caught their eye. I can only speculate. I got offers from other colleges where I had no alumni connection so I don't think it's about that. As for the Porsche 924, meh. It was a regrettable money-pit, a hand-me-down from my father and, as I was constantly reminded by car enthusiasts, "basically a Volkswagen".
Corey - I'm starting a new children's computing company and I've literally shown my old Print Shop creations to investors when explaining what we're doing. Would love to tell you more about what we're building -- we're trying to make software in 2024 that makes kids feel what I felt in 1990 when using software like the Print Shop, KidPix, Pinball Construction Set, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and others. You can contact me at amal@cartwheelcomputer.com
I don't have any experience starting a company so I can't say. I will say that computers (and therefore expectations) were vastly simpler back then. You could reasonably believe you understood exactly what was happening in every piece of your Apple ][, and that allowed you to sometimes do some clever/tricky stuff with it.
My point is that this scale meant that one person could write a program of publishable quality all by themselves. This would be borderline impossible today. I'm thinking of AAA video games and their enormous development costs. It's still possible to do some quirky or cult products (like agar.io or homestuck or whatever) that could be the work of one person.
In some ways, I think it was easier to get something unique going. The market was quite new and hungry for applications that made computers useful for everyday people.
Print Shop was absolutely one of those "applications that made computers useful for everyday people" for sure! Also, Print Shop on an Apple ][+ (Wow! A whole 64K of RAM and a 1Mhz CPU! So powerful! LOL!) with one of the earliest Epson 24pin dot-matrix printers, in combination with some crafty "cut and paste" skills (back when "cut and paste" still meant exacto-knife, rubber cement, and photocopy) made teenage-me a whole lotta spending money back then sellin' my "document design skills" to local businesses. My eternal thanks to all y'all folks who created Print Shop! May it live forever in the history books as the masterful achievement it was! ;)
Were you also involved in making Music Shop? I loved that program as well, and I can still hum some of the tunes that were included with it, like Kajun Klog, Oogie Boogie and the various arrangements of classical repertoire.