A look back in time. How the Macintosh, desktop publishing and a few innovators changed the way students produce scholastic media.
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ON JAN. 22, 1984, the first Macintosh commercial aired to an audience of 96 million early in the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl, in which the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington Redskins 38-9 in Tampa (Fla.) Stadium. Conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas and Lee Clow at Chiat\ Day. Produced by New York production company Fairbanks Films and directed by Ridley Scott. English athlete Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine and David Graham as Big Brother. Its only U.S. daytime televised broadcast was on Jan. 22, 1984, during and as part of the telecast of the third quarter of the CBS telecast of the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl. It has subsequently been called a watershed event and a masterpiece in advertising. In 1995, the Clio Awards added it to its Hall of Fame, and Advertising Age placed it on the top of its list of 50 greatest commercials. Production budget: $900,000 Cost: $800,000 for 60-second ad slot SOURCE: HTTP://WWW. CURTSMEDIA.COM/CINE/1984. HTML
Innovators ignite revolution in desktop publishing and scholastic media BY BRADLEY WILSON, MJE
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n a veiled deference to IBM, then the big brother of computing, and in an obvious reference to George Orwell’s book 1984, the original Apple Macintosh advertisement took place over the audio of Big Brother. “My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!”
While IBM dominated the world of personal computing after introducing the personal computer (PC) in 1981 (even though the company released the 16K 5100 “portable computer” six years earlier), Big Brother was not the only game in town as personal computing evolved in the last two decades of the 20th century. A few innovators, leading players in that new game, saw possibilities with a new industry — desktop publishing. People such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates still top the list of innovators in the personal-computing revolution. People such as John Warnock, Paul Brainerd, Chuck Geschke and Jonathan Seybold, not so much. Warnock and Geschke, however, went on to found Adobe and the Page Description Language PostScript at the heart of all printing devices today. Brainerd left Atex to found Aldus, the company that created PageMaker and coined the phrase “desktop publishing.” Seybold is considered by some to be the father of desktop publishing. As innovators were pushing forward with desktop publishing in the mid-1980s, scholastic media educators were living in a world of QuadPaks, video yearbooks and yearbooks centered on spin-off themes. It was time for a change, time for customer-led innovation. Tired of waxing copy. Tired of pasting Rubylith and black squares in place of photos. Tired of paying extra for close register. Eager for more control over the process, desktop publishing provided the solution for scholastic media advisers. However, the evolution of desktop publishing did not occur overnight. It began with students and advisers playing with the software bundled with that first Macintosh: MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw. These software packages set the tone for modern word processors such as Microsoft Word, bit-map editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop and vector-based editing tools such as Adobe Illustrator. While fun for creating bar charts and pie graphs and for setting text at least initially, they did not prove too useful for publications. It was 1985, a year later, when Aldus released PageMaker and Apple
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“The Macintosh has a way of releasing a creative spirit in kids. It literally compels them to experiment, to go beyond the boundaries of what’s expected and what’s predictable.” Bruce Watterson, Journalism Teacher, Ole Main High School, North Little Rock, Arkansas in “Teachers on Teaching,” Apple Computer Company, 1987
1987 WILDCAT (KATHY BURKHALTER AND KIM EDWARDS, EDITORS) COLOPHON: “If there was any doubt that electronics was as synonymous with yearbook production as ink and slick-finished paper, it was put to rest in Room 23 by April 23. The country took notice. In October, Mr. Jim Jordan, yearbook adviser from Sacramento, Calif., visited the classroom for several days, watching production and working with staffers to polish his newly established Mac System. ¶ In February, Mrs. Sheryl Fulton, yearbook adviser and media consultant from Fort Collins, Colo., used a mini-sabbatical to learn from student
1987 EL PAISANO (ALEX GROSSMAN, EDITOR) COLOPHON: “Copy typeset in Palatino on Microsoft 3.0 using Macintoshes with portions of graphics designed on PageMaker and all printed on the Apple LaswerWriter Plus. All pages pasted up by staff under the guidance of adviser John Cutsinger.”
1986 WILDCAT (ELLEN FAUBUS, EDITOR) COLOPHON: The staff received Macintosh computers on Dec. 10, 1985, and make the first deadline on Jan. 10, 1986. The 224-page book finaled on March 29, 1986.
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journalists, demonstrating production techniques via the Mac. The week flew by. ¶ “All the attention made the year special,” Bo Edwards said. “The best thing about the other teachers was the increased worldview each brought to our class. We learned as they learned. They never sat by and let us do all the work without asking questions and sharing knowledge. This mentor-teacher program of exchange between high schools nationwide is a superb idea.”
released the LaserWriter that things changed. Almost immediately, schools began setting columns of text and pasting them up even if they could only use three fonts: Times, Helvetica and Courier. The change saved schools money on typesetting and gave the students control over what was submitted to the printer. While the screens were relatively low resolution — output on a laser printer at 300ppi resulted in 30lpi output, less than one-half of the 65-85lpi output used at the time — the type was crisp. Within five years, newspaper and yearbook publishers were using image setters, capable of printing at resolutions of up to 2,540 dots per inch, for type output at resolutions above what the printing press could handle. Instead of looking like giant dots, the gray screens were smooth and graduated gray screens did not have lines of gray in them. School publications could use rule lines touching gray screens, close register, without additional charges. By the mid-1990s, only 10 years after the desktop revolution began, disk submission of type was the norm. Portrait companies began giving schools compact discs (CDs) full of digital images in the late 1990s. Photoshop pushed digital editing of photos during the same era. By the turn of the century, affordable digital SLR cameras made digital photography the latest frontier. By 2002, schools submitted publications to the printer all on disk, including photos, and switched to submitting PDF files shortly thereafter. The rapid improvements sent almost complete control to the classroom. In the 30 years since the introduction of desktop publishing, it has certainly prevailed, becoming a multibillion-dollar industry. Today, all four of the national yearbook publishing companies and national printers of newspapers now have online desktop publishing software, they all rely on conventional desktop publishing for the majority of their business. It was innovators such as the advisers on the following pages — and many others — who led the desktop publishing revolution in scholastic media education. n
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BRUCE WATTERSON. 1989 PHOTO BY JOHN MOORE, COURTESY TEXAS UNIVERSITY INTERSCHOLASTIC LEAGUE
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ADVANCEMENT IN ARKANSAS
Bruce Watterson Back in 1984, the Arkansas man with the soft, gentle voice, Bruce Watterson, was teaching a full load of journalism classes at Ole Main High School, now North Little Rock High School. His staffs were learning how to use typesetting equipment to produce publications: newspapers, magazines and yearbooks. During the summer then, as now, he taught workshops throughout the nation, including one at Stanford (Calif.) University.
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vividly recall that workshop. On a walk across the campus, I stopped by a kiosk to read the campus announcements. One of them was an invitation from Apple Computers and Aldus PageMaker software to test-drive a new Macintosh with laser-print quality output and potentially trendsetting publishing capabilities. Surprised to find a young woman on roller skates at the door and a room full of collegians, both professors and students, I took a seat. Eventually, I played with the equipment for a minute (OK, for more than two hours) and was hooked. Unfortunately, the school’s print shop had just received new Compugraphic typesetting equipment that cost more than $40,000. I only wish I had seen the demonstration a month or two earlier. To complicate matters, my colleague Willie Vincent and I were the champions of installing the typesetting equipment. We printed our school newsletters, magazines and newspapers on campus in the print shop. Despite that order, Watterson said he was able to purchase a 512K Macintosh, a LaserWriter and PageMaker 1.0 for the journalism room. Talk about bare bones start-up material. No one else in the scholastic journalism arena was experimenting with the technology so we were largely self-taught desktop publishers. In addition to working with the student publications, I learned by producing other publications on machines that, at the time, used only floppy disks and a printer that only had fonts such as Times, Helvetica and Courier installed. Traveling coast-to-coast to engage fellow teachers, I began training other educators for Apple Computer Inc. in exchange for equipment for my home and for the school. Sensing the importance of desktop technology, the National Scholastic Press Association asked me to write a column on new software and hardware advances for the “Trends” publication for their membership. Through our collective efforts, we were able to meet with yearbook publishers, such as Jostens and others, and nudge them (sometimes unwillingly) into the desktop era. I recall frustrating issues of resolution, pagination and the reproduction quality of photographs and screens as the companies moved into the desktop-publishing world where the customer had more control over the process from start to finish. However, a few of us pushed them forward. Within four to five years, desktop publishing was firmly installed in the yearbook-publishing domain. Sure, there were issues and struggles. But nothing compared to printers using hot type, filling trays with metal characters and setting those by hand. Nothing in paste-up technology was like the Compugraphic chemical paper that often “yellowed” and had to be re-processed and re-waxed to fit into panels or columns of copy. Yes, there were still plastic packets of Chartpak rule lines everywhere, but desktop publishing put students in charge of their design fate. What a privilege it was to have been on the cusp of such a trendsetting time. n
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H.L. HALL. PHOTO FROM 1987 PIONEER YEARBOOK
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EXCITEMENT IN MISSOURI
H.L. Hall
Shortly after school began in September 1985, the principal and superintendent asked H.L. Hall if he would like to go with them to see a demonstration of Macintosh computers. On the trip back to school, Hall could tell they were going to purchase an Administrative Kit, which consisted of three Macintosh 512K computers and a LaserWriter printer.
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thought they were going to purchase it for the publications, but they wound up giving The Call and Pioneer two of the 512K computers while the other one and the printer were kept in the central office. That was a nightmare for us as it meant we had to save files on a floppy disk. Then I had to take the files to central office after hours to print all the copy. Students were not allowed to be in central office after the doors were locked at 5 p.m. Our deadlines lasted long past 5. That meant I had to print out all the copy, stay there and proof it — and then make changes and reprint. I had never done that as I was a firm believer that all work should be done by students. After doing a couple of issues of The Call that way, I asked my principal if publications could purchase an Administrative Kit with their money. They said they could so we wound up with four 512K computers and a LaserWriter. In those days the main programs were MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw. Graphic possibilities were rather limited. I refused to let students use the weird headline software program as the headline fonts available were off the wall. Kirkwood was among the first schools in the nation to use Macintosh computers to produce both the yearbook and the newspaper. We added two Macintosh Plus computers in 1986 and Macintosh SE computers in 1987. By the 1990s, we had Macintosh PowerBook laptop computers. When I retired in 1999, we had more than 30 computers in the classroom, and we had two printers. We were using Aldus (then Adobe) PageMaker, Adobe Photoshop, Aldus FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator. Digital cameras were just coming into vogue, and disk submission was available for the yearbook. We had come a long way from our meager beginnings in 1985. I initially thought that computers would make our job faster and easier, but as we used more advanced software programs, we also created more advanced designs, which took more time. Thus, we spent more time on both the yearbook and newspaper than we had in previous years. Nevertheless, my students learned valuable skills that proved beneficial to their futures. I wouldn’t go back. Being one of the first to use the new technology was exciting. Even though there were headaches to begin with, we were still able to have more control than ever before. Getting rid of rub-on letters, X-Acto knives, waxers and trying to get rule lines on tape laid out straight with corners aligned also eliminated a lot of problems. It made it a lot easier for me to say “Yesss! Yesss! Yesss” to students. Their designs came alive with new ideas, and being able to be more creative made everyone on the staff stay alive, awake, alert and enthusiastic. We were doubling our fun! I wish I were still in the classroom working with innovative students who have even more exciting ways to create dynamic publications. The technology advancements since my retirement 15 years ago have astounded me. I said 15 years ago that the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life was to put my key in my classroom door knowing I would never go back again. If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have retired. I’d love to be able to say “Yesss! Yesss! Yesss” to students who are doing the unbelievable and to tell them they had just made my day. n
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JIM JORDAN
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CRAZINESS IN CALIFORNIA
Jim Jordan Personal computers were definitely a topic of conversation at Del Campo High School in Fair Oaks, Calif. as well as in the educational world. Adviser Jim Jordan knew there were a few Apple IIe computers on campus. He was also aware there was a whole lab of Radio Shack TRS-80 computers. In that lab, Jordan made his first connection with a personal computer. After learning that a student in the district had developed a program to calculate grades, Jordan discovered teachers were using the program. He decided to give it a try.
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rom that minimal exposure, I went to the challenges of using computers to produce publications. In 1982-83, I started advising yearbook. I vividly remember getting two brand new IBM Selectric typewriters in 1985. What else could we possible need? People were talking about their Compugraphic machines and other types of electronic typesetters as a way to introduce technology into their programs, but I still was not convinced. In the summer of 1985, I was working at a workshop at Stanford University with H.L. Hall and Bruce Watterson, who had first seen the PageMaker beta demonstration there in 1984. I remember sitting in a dorm lounge one evening hearing them talk about the Macintosh computer and the LaserWriter II printer and how they felt that this was going to be the answer to bring personal computer technology to the world of scholastic journalism. As it turned out both H.L. and Bruce bought the hardware and software. They used the Macs, Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word to set the type and create graphics that were printed using the LaserWriter II printer then pasted up on boards that were then sent to the printer, which shot the negatives, stripped in the photos and then created the plates from which the printing was done. That next April on my Easter break. I attended a seminar put on by Net Profit computers, a local computer store, at the Sacramento Inn. The seminar leader/presenter was John McWade, founder and creative director of Before & After magazine. He gave a hands-on demonstration on what the Mac, Aldus PageMaker and the LaserWriter II printer could do. This was the revelation for me. I could now visualize how it all might work in the yearbook context. By the beginning of summer, we had made our initial hardware and software purchase to begin our “desktop publishing” journey. Apple at that time sold a desktop-publishing bundle: two Mac Plus computers with 1 MB of memory, Aldus PageMaker, Word and a LaserWriter II printer, costing more than $9,000. At the end of my fourth year as adviser, I was considering switching yearbook companies. As part of my bid, I pitched to Walsworth that they needed to get on board with this desktop publishing movement and that we should explore it together. I asked them to send me to Bruce Watterson’s classroom at North Little Rock High School to see how he had been able to produce the 1986 Wildcat. When Bruce wheeled out the two little Macs on carts and I saw what his students had done, I knew my students could do it too. We met with Walsworth executives and discussed how desktop publishing was going to completely change the yearbook business. I predicted that in five years 50 percent of their business would use this technology, and I was pretty close to being correct. That first year was CRAZY to say the least. We could not figure out PageMaker quickly enough so for the first part of the year (up until Christmas) all we did was print columns of type in Word, print them on the LaserWriter and then paste them on the boards. Progress was super slow. We had never pasted up before so there was a learning curve there too. We did not turn in a single page to the publisher until January. During winter break all we did was work on the book. We never worked on Sundays, but beyond that we were in the yearbook room inventing how to use this technology every day during that break except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. I think we worked half a day on New Year’s Eve. We pasted up our spreads through 1992-93. Digital layout submission did not begin for us until 1993-94. We dabbled with some digital photos as graphics as early as the first year, but we did not submit any photos digitally in 1996. We used some darkroom-developed conventional photos as late as 2000. Beyond that we have been 100 percent digital. n SUMMER 2014
Jim Jordan and Laura Merrifield produced Desktop Yearbooks: Designing and Producing Yearbooks with Apple Macintosh for Walsworth Publishing in 1989.
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NICK FERENTINOS WITH SENIOR VANESSA LEE, EPITAPH NEWS EDITOR
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CONNECTIONS IN CALIFORNIA
Nick Ferentinos In May 1986, Nick Ferentinos attended a one-day event at the San Francisco Press Club, where Apple demonstrated early desktop publishing technology by using a MacPlus, the LaserWriter II and Aldus PageMaker Version 1.2. He went home and called one of the school’s famous graduates, Steve Wozniak, whose number was listed locally. Wozniak’s answering service took the call, but he came on the line when Ferentinos identified himself as a teacher at Homestead High School, where he had graduated in 1968, as the adviser to The Epitaph, the student newspaper on which his sister once served.
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told him what I had seen and wondered if he could help us get started using the new technology. He had been famously generous with the school (new backstop for the baseball diamond, stuff like that). He paused and then said he thought he could give us “10 or 12K,” meaning, of course, $10,000-$12,000. He stipulated that I was to buy the equipment from Computer Plus, the first Apple store anywhere, and the only one of its kind. It was located only a few blocks from the school and was managed by Mark Wozniak, his younger brother. He also said I should buy a hard drive. Because I knew little more about computers than what I had seen demonstrated at the Press Club, I asked, “What’s that?” “Never mind,” he replied, “you’ll need it.” What I wound up getting exceeded the amount he specified. We purchased two Mac Plus computers for about $2,500 each, a LaserWriter II for (are you ready for this?), $7,500, the Apple serial port HD20 (20 big megabytes and we wondered how we would ever fill it), and PageMaker version 1.2. We began using the technology in the fall of 1986. I have to believe we were among the earliest anywhere in the world using it to produce a newspaper. Because we were publishing a long tabloid, we couldn’t print out an entire page until much later when we bought an 11-by-17-inch printer so we printed stories and continued using the old paste-up methods. But we designed full pages on the computers. By the next year after I had taught all the students to use it, they were teaching me. Those first years of learning to use the Mac, software and the other hardware were heady. I wanted to learn everything instantly, but it proved burdensome to keep up with the rapid changes in technology that were popping up everywhere. I never felt I was fully up to speed after the first couple of years of doing DTP. Before the beginning of the 1986-87 school year, I devoted a good part of the previous summer learning to use the technology. Before school resumed, I taught DTP at my district’s newly created Institute for Computer Technology to students and teachers in the region. One of my adult students was Esther Wojcicki, the now-legendary “Woj” at Palo Alto (Calif.) High School, where she went on to create one of the largest and most successful journalism programs in the nation. By the early 1990s, schools throughout the nation had adopted DTP. While The Epitaph’s sophistication was peaking. By 1995 other publications supplanted it. As much as I kept up on the technology, I was woefully ignorant about it compared to my best students. Living in the shadow of Apple less than two miles from the campus and with the legacy left behind by both Woz and Steve Jobs, tech-savvy students vied to get on staff. Journalism was the only school program in which students were using computers to make something other people could consume. The work, among the best of its kind, was reflected in multiple Pacemakers, Gold Crowns and many other awards. As fast as we thought the technology was changing then, comparing it to the explosion of new technology today makes me dizzy. Today tech-savvy media educators stay current and take that knowledge to their classrooms as the new tech develops exponentially. I am impressed. n
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The Epitaph, Sept. 19, 1986: “This is the first issue of The Epitaph produced on the Macintosh computer system donated by Apple founder Steve Wozniak. We hope that this new system will improve the readability of The Epitaph.”
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JOHN CUTSINGER. PHOTO COURTESY TEXAS UNIVERSITY INTERSCHOLASTIC LEAGUE
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TRANSFORMATION IN TEXAS
John Cutsinger The good old days meant manually drawn layout sheets to mark photo and graphic placement and a remarkably difficult mathematical formula for “guaranteeing” copy fitting of headlines, stories and captions — that is the fond remembrance John Cutsinger has of his earliest days as adviser. Then transfer type and rule line tape totally changed the production mode. His first memory of real trendsetting technology involved the staff setting its own type at the local printer after hours for more complete control of its work. Soon staff members added drafting tables and T-squares — they were so ahead of their time.
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ny innovator status I might have attained was always motivated by my desire to provide my students with an innovative educational experience. After a workshop at Ball State University, my yearbook and newspaper editor Dane Reese suggested we get a Mac. I responded with “McDonalds doesn’t open for a couple of hours, but then lunch is on me.” We paid for our first three Macintosh computers out of advertising funds from the previous year. With Aldus PageMaker 1.0, we started our desktop publishing experience. Yearbook and newspaper staff members loved the ability not only to plan but also to produce camera-ready publications. They inspired me. Our administration supported progress out of feeling sorry for us. I would have six students waiting behind three others for access to the three machines. When my principal saw the lines, he offered us three more computers. As a result of our use of Apple technology, we were selected as a Journalism Classroom of Tomorrow, and I was tapped as an Apple educator. The truth is that Reese went with me everywhere to illuminate who was truly the innovator, and he allowed me to tag along. Desktop publishing changed my approach to teaching and my life as a publications adviser. I designed handouts and even tests. Desktop publishing motivated me to become the ultimate yearbook nerd. Particularly in yearbook-land, there was a complete change in the way everything worked on a BIG scale. Yearbook companies first realized that the front end of production inside their plants was vulnerable. Soon, though, they began creating desktop-publishing enhancement programs and promoted the dream. Then came the realization that they could revolutionize the way in which they could support their yearbook staffs. Despite all the uncertainty, not knowing exactly what to do or how to do it and not having anyone to ask, I have no regrets about becoming a desktop publishing guinea pig. In 1985, we just jumped. The splash high school journalists made still ripples through publication rooms today. n
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Apple computer featured Westlake High School (Austin, Texas) publications in a 1988 publication, Inspiring Educators: True Stories About Macintosh in Schools.
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JACK KENNEDY WITH EMILY WU
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COMMITMENT IN IOWA
Jack Kennedy The “tease” for the 1985 PageMaker workshop was that teachers could become much cooler, more exciting and more efficient instructors if their handouts were designed and produced by using PageMaker. It was a clever way to induce advisers to try this new-fangled software. As a result, journalism teacher Jack Kennedy soon found himself in a desktop publishing workshop taught by Texas adviser John Cutsinger in Iowa City, Iowa.
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mmediately I realized the challenges were immense, at least for me. We had invested about $15K in a Varityper phototypesetter in 1981 and eventually bought two satellite input terminals so three students could be typing copy. We had four large light tables, each of which could hold four tabloid spreads for paste up. Weaning ourselves from that investment was not easy. The $15K Varityper was a lot to toss over, but some local printers and designers (in Iowa City) were early adopters. After seeing what PageMaker 1.0 could do, I was intrigued. I advised both yearbook and newspaper, and the book was a big seller so money was not as much an issue as desire. When we did take the plunge (I’m pretty sure it was 1986), we went with the DOS version of PageMaker 1.0 because we had an IBM PC, which we used to input for the Varityper. That computer had 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. It cost $3,000. We bought a laser printer and became experts in tiling our output for paste-up. We still had to deliver our paste-up boards to the local printer, the Iowa City Press-Citizen. We shipped diskettes to our yearbook publisher so at least we did not have to put that together on the light table, and we certainly did not have the memory or technology to place photos. Those were still tagged and shipped along with the layouts. The publisher (Walsworth at first) still scanned the photos, created composites and sent proofs. My editors, always seniors, were excited to try this new software so the new group was quite willing to try out something different. At the time, the City High principal wrote his memos in long hand and handed them off to his secretary for typing. Trust me when I say, our first PC in journalism was among the first in the entire building. We might as well have been practicing black magic up in Room 213, and that included the Varityper. The first Mac versions of PageMaker required near-constant inserting and ejection of 3.5-inch floppy disks. The Varityper used 8-inch floppies, and the IBM PCs used 5.25-inch disks. As we added computers, we bought Iomega Zip drives built-in because they held so much more data. I used to teach a workshop on paste up through the University of Iowa as part of the adviser training sequence. Overlays, registration marks, X-Acto cuts, cutting corners of border-tape boxes at 45-degree angles to avoid shadows when the boards were photographed by the printer ... not bad income for me. And I never really went away from DOS and Windows, which got me a gig helping set up IBM PC labs in Weisbaden, Germany, in the late 1980s for the Department of Defense Dependent School system (I was the only person anyone knew who used Windows 1 and PageMaker) so that was cool. There is something simultaneously exciting and scary about being first, of course, but it didn’t take long until the availability of more computers (we quickly went from one to three to 10 to 24 over about five years) became an important part of my recruiting. The best students in what was a very good school were eager to get their hands on cool technology at a time when having a home computer was not common. I liked the idea of my program leading the way, whether in coverage, design or technology. We took a lot of chances at City High. We won our first National Pacemaker for newspaper for the 1984-85 volume, the last volume before desktop publishing. (And this was back in the days when there were only five national Pacemakers … had to beat out those hotshot Chicago area papers that were legendary). The Little Hawk became a true national leader, winning 10 more National Pacemakers through 1999. I had great students to work with and great mentors plus JEA and IHSPA and, well, I had Iowa City. But I suspect the momentum we created by always being at the forefront of the thennew technology and software did not hurt in getting all those great students to try their hand at journalism. n
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“I remember getting the first Mac and thinking we would just set a few headlines and cutlines and paste them on the camera-ready page. We did that for one issue and then, by the next issue, we were essentially setting all our stories, waxing them and doing the paste-ups ourselves..” Candace Perkins Bowen, MJE, then at St. Charles (Ill.) East High School now at Kent State University The initial issue was published as a magazine insert. Subscriptions were $19.95 for six issues. “Publish! represents a vision of a magazine about a new technology — a technology used to produce the magazine itself,” said David Bunnell, publisher and editor. “The significant economies that can be realized, the accessibility, the control, the ability to do your own publication from scratch — all of these are possible today with desktop and personal computer publishing.” PC World, July 1986
Steve McKinstry, then an assistant art director for the Seattle Times, reported on that newspaper’s examination of computerized pagination. Designers know that a computer such as a Macintosh, in conjunction with a laser printer, is capable of producing good-looking maps and charts, but they may not yet be aware of its potential as a layout tool. Computers begin putting the controls for the future electronic design of newspapers in the hands of the visual journalist. Design: The Journal of the Society of Newspaper Design, 1986, No. 21
Desktop publishing for the PC has arrived, Diane Burns and S. Venit said in the article, “Muscling in on the Mac.” It’s interesting to note that the IBM seems to be moving in the direction of becoming more Macintosh like. PageMaker is the program that got desktop publishing off the ground. Last November, Aldus formed an alliance with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard to establish the desktop publishing solution for the IBM PC and compatibles, thereby ensuring PageMaker a prominent place in the PC market. PageMaker on the PC is likely to have a tremendous psychological advantage over other products. PC Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 3, February 1987
Timeline of desktop publishing 1952
Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor invented the trackball while working on the Royal Canadian Navy’s DATAR project, a secret military project.
1972
Bill English, builder of Engelbart’s original mouse, invented the ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox; early version called “X-Y Position Indicator For a Display System.”
1974
Bravo, a document preparation program for the Alto produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues, is considered the first program to incorporate WYSIWYG technology. Bravo displays text with formatting and uses screen display of 72 “PostScript point” per inch to approximate standard typographic measurements of 72 points per inch. Bravo was never released commercially.
late 1970s “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) phrase coined at Xerox; implies a user interface that allows the user to view something similar to the end result while creating a document. 1981
Quark Software Inc. was founded; created Word Juggler, the first word processor on the Apple III.
1981
Seybold Seminars, the premier trade show for the desktop publishing and pre-press industry, was founded.
1983
Apple introduces ImageWriter.
1984
Apple introduces Macintosh with MacPaint and MacDraw and graphical user interface (GUI) on Jan. 24. It contained an 8MHz processor, 128K RAM and a 400K floppy disk drive; $2,500.
1984
Macworld magazine begins publication; it is the oldest Macintosh magazine still in publication.
1985
Aldus Corp. founder Paul Brainerd coins the phrases “desktop publishing.”
1985
Aldus Corp. releases PageMaker for the Macintosh in July. The PageMaker program relies on Adobe’s PostScript page description language; $695.
1985
Apple releases first version of its personal computer with a hard drive, 10MB.
1985
In March, Apple releases the high-resolution (300 dpi) desktop LaserWriter. The innovation brings publishing to the desktop for the first time; $6,995; contains three basic fonts: Times, Helvetica and Courier.
18 | COMMUNICATION: JOURNALISM EDUCATION TODAY | a publication of the Journalism Education Association
Paul Brainerd, as a student at the University of Oregon, worked on the Daily Emerald.
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SUMMER 2014
It was daunting at first. I did a week’s sabbatical with Bruce Watterson to learn how he managed his staff while teaching them PageMaker and how to manage computer usage time. We couldn’t afford enough Macs in the classroom for all the students to be working on them. Sheryl Fulton, then at Fort Collins (Colo.) High School, now with Jostens The index tagline for Terry Ulick’s article summed it up: “It’s really shipping, and it’s really good.” “Aldus has released PC PageMaker, and it’s everything that the Macintosh version is — and more.” After sidebars on which graphic cards to purchase, problems with the $695 release and lists of supported software, Ulick concluded, “Aldus has taken an unruly beast, the MS DOS environment, and has managed to put PageMaker in it and tame it. PC PageMaker is a winner.” Personal Publishing, March 1987, Vol. 3, No. 2
The Apple LaserWriter was announced at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on Jan. 23, 1985, the same day Aldus announced PageMaker. 0.5MB ROM | 1.5MB RAM | 300 dpi | 8 ppm | 77 pounds | $6,995.
SUMMER 2014
In his article, “PageMaker in a Big Blue Suit,” Jim Heid said that aside from its usefulness as a designer’s tools, PageMaker stands out in the crowd of PC publishing because it’s the first to work with Microsoft Windows. Other major PC publishing programs — Xerox’s Ventura Publisher in particular — are not designed for page-by-page layout but instead for global formatting of long documents. PageMaker is the best pasteboard-oriented publishing tool for DOS computers. Publish!, Vol. 2, No. 4, May 1987
1986
Aldus releases PageMaker for the IBM/PC-compatible; releases Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) standard.
1986
Apple releases the LaserWriter Plus with more built-in fonts, including Palatino, Bookman, Avant Garde, New Century Schoolbook and Zapf Chancery.
1986
Ventura Publisher is running the Graphical Environment Manager extension to DOS operating system; invented by Meyer, Don Heiskel and Lee Jay Lorenzen; $895.
1986
Charles “Nick” Corfield released Framemaker 1.11 as a WYSIWYG document editor on the Sun-2 workstation.
1987
QuarkXPress 1.0 released for Macintosh only; $695.
1987
Aldus PageMaker 2.0 released; $495..
1987
Thomas Knoll, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, conceptualizes his software program “Display” to display grayscale images on a monochrome display.
1987
Adobe Illustrator released.
1988
GEM Desktop Publisher released by Digital Research; $395.
1988
Knoll renames his software program “ImagePro” and still later “Photoshop” and sells it with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan.
1988
Apple releases LaserWriter II, a 300dpi printer rated at 8 ppm.
1988
Aldus releases FreeHand vector-based drawing program; released PageMaker 3.0 in May.
1988
Adobe purchases license to distribute Photoshop.
1988
Ventura Publisher 2.0 released; $895.
1989
QuarkXPress 2 released.
1989
FrameMaker 2 released; includes paragraph designer and character designer and equation editor.
1990
Adobe Photoshop 1.0 released.
1990
QuarkXPress 3 released. $795.
1990
Chuck Weger coins and popularizes the term “preflight” to refer to the process of checking a document’s fonts, links and other items before they are printed.
1991
FrameMaker 3 released.
1991
PageMaker 4.0 released includes indexing features; $795.
“If there’s one Macintosh program that PC users lust for, it’s PageMaker,” Richard Jantz wrote in “Publishing Meets Its PageMaker.” “PageMaker has towered above the competition like a software King Kong, commanding the kind of cult following once reserved for brilliant movie stars and WordStar. It’s easy to learn. It’s exceedingly capable. And you can live with its quirks.” PC World, June 1987, Vol. 5, No. 6
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“Early desktop publishing definitely shaped my early work experiences, and I believe those benefitted me in my career. For me, yearbook was a lot of project management, and that has been my career.” Danielle Yates Quinton, then student at Del Campo High School (Fair Oaks, Calif.) now at OneHP Discussing hardware and software as well as service, support and training in the cost of desktop publishing, author Rochelle Garner said, “Desktop publishing opened the doors of corporate America for the Macintosh, including the doors of accounting departments, where the numbers people make sure that executives considering a desktop publishing system look at the total range of factors. Macintosh Business Review, Premiere Issue, May 1988
Eric Brown envisioned the future in his article, “Desktops of the Future.” “Desktop publishing in the year 1999. Compact computers. Large, full-color, typesetresolution screens. Expect faster hardware and more powerful operating systems that allow more than one application program to run at the same time. Look forward to the smoother integration of programs. Anticipate networks that seamlessly connect different types of computers.” Publish!, Vol. 2, No. 11, December 1987
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1991
Kodak released the first commercially available digital SLR camera, the Professional Digital Camera System, later unofficially named DCS 100 with 1.3 megapixels.
1992
PageMaker 4.2 released — included drop caps, style sheets, indexing; considered one of the most stable versions of the product; $795.
1992
Joint Photographic Experts Group releases requirements and guidelines for JPEG standard.
1992
QuarkXPress 3.1 released; provides Windows support for first time.
1993
Adobe releases Acrobat 1.0 the Portable Document Format for the paperless office.
1993
Aldus releases PageMaker 5.0.
1993
FrameMaker 4 released.
1993
Corel acquires Ventura Publisher and renames it Corel Ventura 4.2
1993
QuarkXPress 3.2 released.
1994
Adobe buys Aldus for $437 million; FreeHand, competitor with Adobe Illustrator, returned to Altsys by order of Federal Trade Commission.
1995
Patrick Marchese and Ronald Crandall launch FlightCheck at Seybold conference.
1995
Macromedia acquires Altsys.
1995
FrameMaker 5 released.
1995
Adobe acquires Frame Technology Corp. and Framemaker desktop publishing software popular with technical writers for $556 million.
1996
QuarkXPress 3.3 released; Quark dominates professional desktop publishing market.
1996
PageMaker 6.5 ships in fourth quarter; $895.
1997
Markzware gets patent for preflighting.
1997
QuarkXPress 4.0 released.
1998
Corel Ventura 8 released.
1999
Adobe project codenamed “Shuskan” and later “K2” renamed “InDesign”; version 1.0 released to replace PageMaker; $793.
2000
FrameMaker 6 released.
Richard Jantz, in “Extra-Strength Ventura,” writes, “Few products deserve more credit than Xerox’s Ventura Publisher for the spread of desktop publishing. Yet through the program’s history, the complaints have often flown as thickly as the praise.” He cited weaknesses of the second version of the software. “You can’t wrap text automatically around an irregularly shaped object, work across two facing pages … or issue an undo command to reverse your last action.” Yet he concluded, “Ventura’s limitations pale beside its latest accomplishments.” Publish!, January 1989, Vo. 4, No. 1
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In Stuart Silverstone conversation with Jonathan Seybold, Seybold said, “No matter how good our tools are for communicating, we still have to have something that is worth communicating. We are filling up everything with more and more communications that are useless junk or that are ineffective. It’s probably a natural consequence of the lowering of barriers and making it easier to communicate.” Aldus Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, May/June 1990
Desktop publishing can more than repay the initial investment of time and money,” Jim Heid said in his article “Page-Layout Contenders.” Comparing Aldus PageMaker 3.01, QuarkXPress 2.0 and Letraset ReadySetGo 4.5, “PageMaker wins the contest hands down. PageMaker does many things right that others do wrong. If you work in an office that uses IBM PCs, there’s another bonus to using PageMaker: it can share publication files with its IBM PC cousin, which works nearly identically.” Macworld, Vol. 6, No. 4, April 1989
THE VISION SERIES
2001
PDF/X-1 and PDF/X-1a become ISO standards internationally.
2001
Adobe PageMaker 7.0 released; $499.
2002
QuarkXPress 5.0 released.
2002
Corel Ventura 10 released.
2002
FrameMaker 7 released.
2002
TIFF standard updated by Adobe.
2003
Scribus desktop publishing application, released under the GNU General Public License as free software.
2003
Adobe Creative Suite 1 released in September; contains InDesign version 3.0 as well as Photoshop, Bridge and Illustrator in Standard Edition.
2003
QuarkXPress 6.0 released, supports MacOS X.
2003
Jostens introduces YearTech Online yearbook production software, U.S. patent no. 7,757,166.
2004
Adobe discontinues PageMaker.
2005
Balfour introduces StudioWorks online yearbook software.
2005
Adobe Creative Suite 2 released in April.
2005
Adobe Systems acquires Macromedia for $3.6 billion; purchase brings print publishing (dominated by InDesign) and online publishing (dominated by Dreamweaver) under Adobe’s control.
2006
QuarkXPress 7.0 released.
2007
Adobe Creative Suite 3 released in April; compiled in Universal Binary compatible with native Intel and PowerPC Macintosh computers.
2007
FrameMaker 8 released.
2008
Adobe releases PDF as an open standard and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 320001:2008.
2008
QuarkXPress 8 released.
2008
Adobe Creative Suite 4 released in October.
2009
FrameMaker 9 released with new interface.
2010
Adobe Creative Suite 5 released in April.
2011
FrameMaker 10 released.
2011
QuarkXPress 9 released.
2012
Adobe Creative Suite 6 released in May.
2012
Adobe FrameMaker 11 released.
2013
Adobe Creative Cloud, a subscription-based service that gives users access to the company’s suites of software, released in June; $49.99/month; replaced the perpetual license model.
2013
QuarkXPress 10 released in September; $849 ($199 for education).
2014
FrameMaker 12 released; $999.
BY MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, BALFOUR
As personal computers became accessible to educators in the mid1980s, a parallel revolution in how yearbooks were prepared by publishers was also underway. As desktop publishing emerged, Taylor Publishing Co., founded in 1938, introduced proprietary software that enabled customers to digitally prepare and submit their yearbook copy to the printing facilities. For Taylor (now Balfour), the significant investment in digital copy preparation was made to satisfy yearbook staffs’ desire for more control over their content. It also allowed the company to streamline the sizable pre-press operation that short-run publications like yearbooks required. The Vision Series software, as it was collectively known, was introduced in 1985. Though rudimentary by today’s standards, the Vision Series completely changed how yearbooks were created. TypeVision, DOS-based software, was used to compose yearbook copy on floppy discs. When PageVision was introduced soon after, it extended the digital creation process to page layout (text was displayed on the screen by “merging” the data from TypeVision). Specialized solutions, such as IndexVision and MoneyVision, came later to allow staffs to manage other specific yearbook tasks. As operating systems and programming languages evolved, the functionality of the original programs soon merged into a singular solution — UltraVision.
FOUNDED IN 1938
SUMMER 2014
In her column discussing a redesigned magazine, Editor Darcy Dinucci said, “At the beginning of Publish’s seven-year history, desktop publishing was a way for low-budget publishers to present simple documents in a form more compelling than the low-resolution Courier they could muster on their dot-matrix printer. Now, that battle is won. Personal computer technology…has become the preferred, even inevitable, method for publishing professionals at all levels.” Publish, Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1992
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