The Desktop Publishing Revolution

Abstract

In 1985, three products came together that would wipe out an industry: the Macintosh (available since 1984), the LaserWriter printer (announced in January 1985), and the software PageMaker (shipped that July). The printer cost almost 7,000 dollars (more than a car) and contained a processor faster than the computer it served. The combination of these three products allowed individuals to produce professional-quality print material that had until then required specialized craftsmen, expensive machines, and weeks of work. Within a decade, entire professions disappeared.

The World Before the Desktop

To understand what happened in 1985, you have to know the world of prepress before it. Producing a newspaper article or a brochure was a multi-step craft process requiring specialized machines and trained professionals.

The dominant technology was the Linotype machine, invented in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler. The device cast liquid lead into letter molds and produced lines of text as solid metal bars, hence line-o-type. A skilled Linotype operator could set about six lines per minute. The machines cost as much as a single-family house; the training took years. The New York Times ran its last Linotype machines until 1978.

The parallel system was the Monotype (Tolbert Lanston, 1885): it cast individual letters instead of whole lines, which allowed finer typographic control, preferred for books and scholarly typesetting with formulas and special characters.

From the early 1960s, phototypesetting displaced hot metal: characters were projected photographically onto film, which was then used to make printing plates. The process was cleaner and faster than lead type, but it was still a craft specialty. Text corrections required newly exposed strips of film; layout changes meant physically re-gluing scraps of paper on light tables.

What an office could produce itself was not in the same category. A daisy wheel printed typewriter-quality text and nothing but the characters on its wheel; a nine-pin dot matrix printer could draw anything and made it look like it had been drawn with nine pins (see The History of Printing). Between the two sat the gap that 1985 closed.

PostScript: The Printer as Computer

The technical foundation of the desktop publishing revolution was not developed by Apple but by two researchers who had left Xerox PARC in frustration.

John Warnock had developed a printer description language called Interpress at Xerox PARC, a system for describing page content independently of the output device. Xerox showed no interest in commercializing it. Warnock and his manager Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems in December 1982 and developed the idea further.

The result, PostScript (1984), was fundamentally different from all previous printer languages. It was not a command list for a specific printer, it was a complete programming language.

Info

PostScript as a Turing-complete programming language: PostScript is a stack-based, dynamically typed programming language, conceptually related to Forth and HP’s reverse-Polish calculators. It supports variables, loops, conditionals, procedures, and recursive calls. A PostScript printer is literally a computer that interprets a programming language and outputs the result as dots of ink. This means a PostScript file is not a bit pattern for a particular printer; it is an abstract description of a page that any PostScript-capable printer can render at its own resolution. 300 DPI on an office laser, 2400 DPI on a professional imagesetter: same file, identical result.

This device independence was the decisive breakthrough. Designers could proof a file on an office printer and send the same file to a print shop, where it was output on professional high-end equipment at offset quality.

The Holy Trinity of Desktop Publishing

On January 23, 1985 (at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting), two products were announced together which, combined with the Macintosh available since January 1984, set off the revolution.

Apple LaserWriter (March 1985, 6,995 US dollars): The LaserWriter was an unusual combination: inside the printer sat a Motorola 68000 processor at 12 MHz, faster than the 8 MHz processor in the Macintosh itself. The printer was more powerful than the computer driving it, because it had to run the PostScript interpreter on its own. It printed at 300 DPI and 8 pages per minute, a quality close to professional prepress. Via AppleTalk it could be shared by up to 16 Macintosh computers, which brought the cost per workstation below 450 dollars.

PageMaker (July 1985, Aldus Corporation): Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus in Seattle, had developed PageMaker as the first WYSIWYG page layout program: What You See Is What You Get. The screen showed the page exactly as it would print. Text columns, images, headlines, rules: everything could be placed and moved with the mouse. Brainerd coined the term “desktop publishing” himself as a marketing phrase to make the concept graspable. Desktop publishing is widely credited with rescuing the commercial fortunes of the Macintosh, which until then had fallen short of sales expectations.

The interplay was decisive: the Macintosh delivered the graphical user interface, PageMaker delivered the layout software, the LaserWriter delivered the output quality, and PostScript connected all three as a common language.

The Extinction of a Craft

The consequences for the prepress industry were dramatic. Between 1985 and 1995, the professional typesetting industry collapsed almost completely.

The professions that disappeared:

Linotype and Monotype operators: specialists trained for years, whose machines became directly obsolete
Paste-up artists: professionals who physically glued strips of paper onto boards to produce layouts
Reprographers and strippers: specialists in photographic film production in darkrooms
Typesetting houses as businesses: outsourced specialty firms before 1985, largely nonexistent after 1995

What emerged were new professions: the graphic designer at the PC. A person who had previously done only design work now took over the entire technical production process. The software democratized skills that had been distributed across craft trades. The entry barrier for professional-looking print dropped from tens of thousands of dollars (machines plus skilled staff) to a few thousand dollars (Mac + LaserWriter + software).

Dead End: Proprietary Typesetting Systems

The Linotype and Monotype systems were not bad technologies; they were masterfully engineered machines that served their purpose for over a century. Their displacement shows a pattern that recurs in computing history: specialized, craft-bound systems displaced by universal, programmable platforms.

The Linotype machine was a perfect vertical integration: keyboard, casting mechanism, type magazine, and line output formed a closed system. Changes were hard. A font change required physically swapping magazines, a format change required manual calibration. The machine could do exactly what it was built for and nothing else.

PostScript and the Macintosh worked by the opposite logic: a universal programming language in the printer, a universal graphical interface on the computer. The system could render any typeface that could be described digitally: no physical magazines, no lead casting. Generality beat specialization.

The actual dead end was not the quality of the analog systems but their incompatibility with the information flow of the digital world. Once text was created digitally (in a word processor, in an editorial system, in a database printout), it was inefficient to transfer it back into an analog system for typesetting. PostScript closed the gap: from keyboard to printed page, without a media break.