The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group DTP I Gave You All The Best Years Of My Life Gordon Woolf |
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Gordon Woolf recalls years of changes in desktop publishing (with apologies to Kevin Johnson*) [C] I can still remember when I [F] bought my first ... Well not quite the first computer (which is still sitting here on the desk beside me - a Radio Shack pocket computer that has 1 KB of an abbreviated Basic language built in) but the first computer which could actually do desktop publishing, a Kaypro ("Darth Vader's lunchbox" was a common description), with 64 KB memory and a 9-inch green screen built in. By using a program called FancyFont, I could actually manipulate the output of the latest in Epson dot matrix printers to put out something resembling print. It was good enough to do the pages for a community newsletter in Bundoora that otherwise found the cost of normal letterpress printing far too expensive to keep going. But actually my love affair with computers and printing started long before that - I was a journalist on a country newspaper in Western Australia and the local TAFE college offered an "introduction to computers". I came to a deal with my employer to give me time off provided I wrote an article. That was in the mid 1970s and the TAFE college had one computer in an air-conditioned dust-free room and a few dumb terminals. By the end of three days I'd written a program in Basic that could take two numbers and add them to produce a deliberately wrong result. But, along with many thousands of other people, I saw the future - and started chasing jobs in journalism where computers would be used to produce the pages. It led several times across this continent to publications which were about to change, but which, a year or so later were still using hot metal as the industry had used, without change, for a hundred years. Then came the chance on the Townsville Daily Bulletin - where we could add the formatting codes to text that would, normally, result in a phototypesetting unit putting out the heading, intro and text, initially in one long column, and then as we became more adept, as a ready rectangle. If we weren't quite so adept, and we missed a merge symbol, a team of compositors could enter the newsroom carrying a length of many yards of photographic paper as a whole story was set in 48pt. |
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| "Rock and Roll I gave you all the Best Years of my Life” was Kevin Johnson’s second hit song, and, ironically, his 1973 tale of the troubador chasing elusive success in San Francisco and London’s Soho was written before he had even set foot outside of Australia. Like his first success, “Bonnie Please Don’t Go (She’s Leaving)” it was a chart success in the USA and it was recorded by many others in several languages, though some could not bring themselves to sing the line “I’ll never be a star". |
[C] Bought all the Beatles records, I [F] sounded just like [G] Paul...
Well, to keep to the theme, this was a little ahead of the scene above. I was running a small music paper and called on a friend of a friend, Bill Harry, who, with his girlfriend had started a weekly tabloid called Mersey Beat and while I was in the office in Liverpool a local record dealer came in wanting a front page pic for his new band and offered us free tickets to the Cavern that night. That may not be a DTP event, but if ever proof was needed that I would stay one step behind, the man was Brian Epstein and the group was... I didn't go.
To get back to the subject, and forward a couple of decades, my next computer was running DR-DOS (pronounced D.R. for Digital Research, not doctor), and then the new MS-DOS as an operating system with a new fangled "graphical user interface" called GEM that let me run Ventura, the layout program by Xerox. Here at last was almost WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) with fonts that would print in 300 dots per inch on my $4000 Texas Instruments A4 laser printer. I could even tape pages together to get tabloid!
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At the same time I was introduced to a program called PageMaker. After chasing all over Australia looking for newspaper jobs with computers, I quite literally ran into the job at a local supermarket when my shopping trolley entangled with one pushed by a journalist I'd sold my freelance business to a few years earlier. Two days later I was working for the Holmes … Court conglomerate with the idea that I should train the journalists on their weekly newspaper in Bunbury. My training consisted of a day with their newspaper designer (anxious to take up a post with the group in London). Half of that day was spent showing me how to use Macs and PageMaker and the rest in a long lunch at a pub run by a well known WA hotelier with the inappropriate name of Drinkwater. I did most of the layout for the next issue, then gradually worked myself out of a job. In that time I was helped by a team of veteran Linotype operators who, because they'd be trained to keep those monster fire-breathing ten ton typewriters going in any circumstances, had a similar attitude to these tiny Macs. If something was wrong, out came the screwdriver... |
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All the [G] dreamy sunny Sundays, all the [F] moonlit summer [C] nights.
Back in the Eastern States, country newspapers were changing to DTP, with Macs or PCs, as they realised that replacing aging phototypesetting
systems or the dedicated laser printer based systems which had replaced them was just too expensive. For a country based company particularly, the idea of a system which could be serviced by the local technician seemed like heaven, as the days of calling for expert help and booking a motel room at the same time retreated into memory.
At least in Victoria, one can almost track whether the local newspaper publisher uses PCs or Macs to which system had the better backup service in the area. For example, there is a distinct sward of PC-based newspapers between the north eastern edge of Melbourne and the north east of this State based on there being a computer dealer, Tony Dell'Oro, based In Wangaratta, who was prepared to spend late nights and into the early hours in towns such as Mansfield finding out why of two apparently identical computer setups, one would print with the correct fonts and the other would not.
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Of course just when we felt we were understanding the intricacies of font settings in Win.ini and atm.ini files and how seemingly identical installations could result in different printer definitions, Mr Gates changed the system. I won't say it is necessarily easier now, but it is certainly different (Ask any Mac OS X technician if he really knows all the places he might find an errant font file!)
I was so busy in the backroom writing [F] love songs to you
Along the way, I learned a lot about PageMaker - to the extent that I turned the training notes I used to teach version 4 into a book, and then followed it with further editions up to version 7. Tim Cole, the world-trotting expert for Adobe who draws thousands to his presentations in Melbourne, kindly referred to me at
one of them as "the god of PageMaker in Australia", but at the same time, the engineers were creating something new.
Now I have (thanks to the soft salesmanship of Phil Lascaris at TECS computer stores) a computer, which, like most of the computers mentioned in this article, cost $2500 and which is capable of running the next generation of desktop publishing programs, InDesign. But I find myself taking a back seat in the forums such as Blueworld InDesign Talk at
http://www.blueworld.com/blueworld/lists/indesign.html, envious of those who saw how things were changing. Take a look at the Australian version of Cleo as just one example - and you'll see what can now be done on a home computer.
And you [F] never even [C] knew
That I was [G] always just [F] one step be-[C]-hind you.
About the Writer
As well as writing several books on publication production (including How to Start and Produce a Magazine or
Newsletter which recently reached Amazon.com's top-2500 listings), Gordon Woolf, as a bass player, has stood behind musicians such as Merv Acheson, Dick Hughes and Graeme Bell in Australia and has played on the same stages but seldom at the same time as many famous musicians. He has slept on the same floor as Eric Bogle and was taken to dinner by Kikki Dee before she recorded a duet with Elton John.
Reprinted from the November 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
