Comment by taeric
5 days ago
Reminds me of printing cards at home. Reading, I almost skipped over where this referenced Print Shop, as I didn't recognize the name. Their article for that, https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/, is ridiculously nostalgic. I think I can hear that main banner printing.
I grew up during the 90s, which was the height of home made greeting cards. Magazines ran huge spreads comparing different programs for how well they could make banners and cards, how good their clip art collection was, and how easy they were to use.
I remember as a kid that making personalized greeting cards was just what you did. I had a computer, I had a color printer, every holiday was getting a unique card! Family events had giant banners that I spend hours taping together. One year I did a space themed banner (I use a "space image" generation program that did stars and nebulas and such) and then realized my mistake when it took forever to print out 15+ sheets of paper with a solid black background (oops).
Nowadays I don't even own a color printer (black and white laser), and I haven't tried making custom cards in forever.
IMHO it is just one more example of how PCs have become content consumption devices rather than outlets for creation.
> IMHO it is just one more example of how PCs have become content consumption devices rather than outlets for creation.
I would argue it’s more of an example of a part of an industry dying because the reality never lived up to the expectations and the individual costs being prohibitive to getting there. As the artwork computers were cable of got better, we weren’t as happy with the quality of image you get from standard printer paper and an inkjet. The difference between photo paper and regular paper in the same printer is night and day, but most people never saw that and most people didn’t want to spend the money that photo paper cost for printing out a single birthday card. Especially when it’s was a 50/50 crapshoot whether your print heads were clogged or would clog half way through and ruin the first print. Add into that the cost of all the ink that was wasted to clean the print heads and the chance that you would just plain be out of a color and unable to print anyway and I think most people just decided the aggravation wasn’t worth the novelty of Clip Art Dog #23 telling you happy birthday.
And then once the internet really took off, who wanted to give a clip art card printed on printer paper when you could send someone a “jibjab” custom e-card with funny animations of your faces?
My old HP 500c was incredibly reliable and it didn't have any of the print head cleaning shenanigans that are needed now days.
It was however dog slow.
I am not sure why modern inkjets need print head cleaning whereas old ones did not.
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Also doing banners to hang up, in MS-DOS with a program I no longer recall the name, it had several fonts and funky layouts to chose from.
Then we would print them into a dot matrix printer, take the dotted sides from the pages out and hang the whole thing.
Searching on the Web, it might have been Banner Mania, but I am not sure.
I still remember how to do the quad fold so that the printed card actually looked like a card
I remember Publish It for the Apple //e. It was unbelievably good for a 1 MHz CPU. And the print quality on a dot matrix was also impressively good (even though it didn’t use the maximum possible 244 dpi my printer had)
We have to cut some slack for the titles from platforms that died - it wasn’t completely their fault at least.
I confess complete bewilderment that Print Shop is still around! It is called out for not being on the main list because it is still selling. Holy crap!