Get the latest tech news

A Tongue-in-Cheek Look Back at Broderbund's 'The Print Shop'

In the early 1980s, if you wanted posters to advertise a yard sale or a party, your options were pretty limited. You could get some blank sheets of paper and some crayons or felt markers for the whole do-it-yourself experience, which was cheap but unless you were a professional illustrator the results were bound to leave something to be desired, if not be downright embarrassing.

And let’s not even get started on greeting cards, those vile instruments of larceny that existed only to relieve you of your Big Mac money because if you didn’t buy them for every birthday, wedding, anniversary and holiday to give to every family member, friend, co-worker and all the other people you were even remotely acquainted with, you were certain to be outed as the tightwad you were and they might not want to be seen in public with you anymore. You needed your own printing device (also co-incidentally called a printer) but you had to be patient because all you (or your parents or boss) could afford was a ‘daisy wheel’ model that punched out each character fully-formed like a typewriter, and unless you were proficient in ASCII art was quite useless for making posters and/or greeting cards, thus doing nothing to fill your stomach with more Big Macs. With no self-interest at all, the publishing industry was extremely skeptical of the emerging threat posed to them by low-cost home computers and dot-matrix printers, mocking the ‘poor quality’ output they produced as unsuitable for anything anyone would dare show to anyone else – but The Print Shop demonstrated people’s standards were much lower than they had anticipated.

Get the Android app