kosak2000

Indeed I think David & Marty's genius was making a tool that had both freedom and guardrails, so people could build something creative without being overwhelmed with too much complexity.

For years after my last dot matrix printer, my mom made me buy reams of fanfold computer paper for her. She loved taking notes with it. "It's so convenient!"

I don't know everything that goes on in the minds of college admissions officers, but I don't think alumni recommendation letters matter very much to them. For me what worked I assume (and this was 35+ years ago, mind you) is having great test scores, starting college four years late, and having what perhaps looked like an entrepreneurial spirit. So I had elements of my background that seemed unusual / interesting and that may have caught their eye. I can only speculate. I got offers from other colleges where I had no alumni connection so I don't think it's about that. As for the Porsche 924, meh. It was a regrettable money-pit, a hand-me-down from my father and, as I was constantly reminded by car enthusiasts, "basically a Volkswagen".

I don't have any experience starting a company so I can't say. I will say that computers (and therefore expectations) were vastly simpler back then. You could reasonably believe you understood exactly what was happening in every piece of your Apple ][, and that allowed you to sometimes do some clever/tricky stuff with it.

My point is that this scale meant that one person could write a program of publishable quality all by themselves. This would be borderline impossible today. I'm thinking of AAA video games and their enormous development costs. It's still possible to do some quirky or cult products (like agar.io or homestuck or whatever) that could be the work of one person.

True, there was certainly no support in the Apple II OS for fonts. I think the OS that came with the IIGS (GS/OS?) may have had font support (but IIGS Print Shop didn't run on top of GS/OS; it booted and took over the machine).

The fonts in Print Shop were bitmaps, drawn at the resolution of the target printers. The code did some modest algorithms on them for kerning, plus italic, underline, and outline style.

I do recall Marty talking a lot about how the product might support resolution-independent vector fonts (this was before such a thing was a standard part of the OS). But of course modern machines caught up and later versions of the product just started using OS fonts.

I just remembered... I think my greatest contribution was in the field of """user experience""" for the Atari 400/800. For printing we had to figure out which way users had their "auto line feed" DIP switch set on their printer. I felt like it would be rather off-putting to ask the user something so technical during setup while they're just trying to get going. So my big idea was to print a big V (like \/) then a carriage return and then an inverted V (like /\). Then the program would ask them whether they saw a diamond or a squiggle on their printer.

Awesome, no I didn't really have any involvement with Music Shop. And (see above) I can only take credit for your banners and cards if you had the Commodore 801 printer :-)

Thank you for the kind words. But I can't take any credit for the creativity behind the product. My role was doing a variety of ports: the Commodore 64 version "side B" (side B of the floppy which had its own set of graphics and fonts that were redrawn to match the scale of the idiosyncratic Commodore printer... was it the 801?) Also the Atari 400/800 port (I ran out of RAM so I decided get rid of Atari DOS and instead write a mini file system sufficient to write save files to the Atari Drive (model 810 I think). The things people let you get away with when you're a teenager... And then the Apple //gs version which was a total rewrite from the ground up and had a variety of new stuff in it.

The credit is due to David and Marty but there's also an interesting backstory. As I understand it, the prototype that David & Marty first brought to Br0derbund was a "Greeting Disk". As in "Wouldn't it be fun for people to be able to make a dynamic, custom greeting disk that they can give to their friends to boot on their computer?" A great idea really, but perhaps a little ahead of its time. I believe it was Br0derbund's Richard Whittaker who first suggested to them "how about printing instead?"

Corey Kosak here. A friend told me this was trending on Hacker News. Ask me anything LOL. Many of the people mentioned in the article are still around so I'll let them know this is happening. :-)