The PrintMaster Saga
A Historical "FanFact"


"Probably the best feature of PrintMaster... was the artwork that Don Joyce (of Negativland/Over The Edge fame) did. The amazing thing about Don was that he walked in having never done computer-based art before, and came up with these amazing images the first day he tried our rather hokey bitmap editor. I thought the artwork was much more sophisticated than what Broderbund was shipping at the time. Amazing for the format (those little bitmaps...)" - An Early PrintMaster Developer


An Ancient PrintMaster User was talking with some folks who worked at Unison World in the early days...


Teacher's Choice Productions

User - "I have been wondering if the PrintMaster that was later distributed by Micrologic Software, and then by Mindscape, and now by The Learning Company (TLC), was the descendant of the Unison World product."

Developer - "Yep, it's the same software. Unison was bought by Kyocera and then at some point sold PrintMaster..."

User - "I noted that you were with Unison World around the time that Broderbund filed their intellectual property case re: The Print Shop vs PrintMaster. I find it ironic that TLC is now the parent company of both PrintMaster and The PrintShop."

"I believe that part of the saga goes something like this... "Unison's program development commenced during license negotiations between the two parties (PrintShop and PrintMaster). During this time, the programmer was instructed to make the IBM version a copy of Print Shop. When negotiations broke down, the programmer was then instructed to take the present state of the program and enhance it to be a better product than Print Shop."

Developer - "Essentially, that's the case. We were going to do a PC version for Broderbund under contract, but Broderbund didn't like the idea of paying us much, so since at the time nobody had ever won a look-and-feel lawsuit..."

"We never saw their source code, nor would it have been very useful, since they AFAIK wrote it in 6502 Assembler, and we wrote PrintMaster in C... Going into the lawsuit, our lawyers took the position that look-and-feel was invalid, and had lots of precedent to back it up. It was actually a landmark case in intellectual property case law, I'm told."

"Macduff Hughes did most of the early work (on PrintMaster) while he was a student at Stanford (he's the one mentioned in the law books about the Broderbund-Unison suit) and Peter MacLeod took it over for a while, and Chico Romano and another programmer by the name of Sheldon finished it after Peter left Unison in 1984."

Teacher's Choice Productions

User - "As an aside, I noticed that after Kyocera bought Unison, PrintMaster's interface changed entirely (between 1986 and 1987) and I assume this was as a result of the Broderbund ruling."

Developer - "Yes, after the ruling, they changed the menus around... they were trying to intimate that there was some originality in the idea of making a vertical menu (i.e. choices one after another in a row, like almost every windowing system in existence). It was kind of funny, but I guess lawyers are like that."

Developer - "(Around that time a lead engineer/inventor by the name of Fred Fischer worked at Unison.) I don't think Fred worked on PrintMaster; I think he worked on that little page layout program, whatever it was called."

Teacher's Choice Productions

"After Fred worked for Unison, he and Adam Ratoosh started MicroLogic, which eventually bought the PrintMaster from Kyocera. I don't know what Kyocera did with the rest of Unison's software. Mindscape bought MicroLogic, which was funny because Macduff was working there at the time, and had to work on PrintMaster again! Then, TLC bought Mindscape."

"We were joking (since Macduff works for Adobe) that Adobe would by TLC and he could work on PrintMaster again..."

User - "He-He... If that happened they could change the name to 'PrintAcrobat Master Illustrator Gold'... I don't think he needs to worry. That was another time and place, and in that time as much as today PrintMaster was a great program... back in the early days there seemed to be something really special about making banners and signs and stuff on our old dot-matrix printers... they didn't even need to be all that complicated."


A computer story:

When I first came upon computers in the early 80s, I was impressed with the then current philosophical approach to creating graphics interfacing which suggested that the goal was to get the computer to act like your brain does, to be intuitively useable.

Then this all reversed and didn't seem to matter anymore. Rather suddenly, we had to learn with difficulty art programs that had and have little to do with how our art brains want to work. When stuff like Adobe appeared, the goal was then to force your brain into compliance with distinctly unintuitive graphic processes.

Computers were no longer trying to be like us, we were trying to be like computers.

That's backwards, and that's when I got out of computer graphics for good.

I still like computers, they're great for writing and probably a few other things, but they remain to this day the worst and most unsympathetic of all mediums to attempt visual art on. Unless you have a hollywood million to work with, they're just plain klunky and force you up against more road blocks than you can shake a mouse at as far as serious art (the human brain type) is concerned.

DJ (Don Joyce) 1999


© CopyLeft Bill Buckels 1999
All Rights Reversed.