The Print Shop

The Print Shop was designed by David Balsam and programmed by Martin Kahn, a California couple, who first conceived it as a video greeting card: you would draw a card on your computer and mail the disk, and it would pop up on the recipient's screen. Brøderbund founder Doug Carlston suggested printing the cards instead, and the program that shipped for the Apple II in 1984 made signs, cards, letterheads and banners from menus, clip art and a handful of fonts, no design skill required. Banners were its party trick. Because printer paper of the day was one continuous perforated sheet, the program could turn any message into giant letters running sideways down the roll, and reviewers noticed that nobody needed the manual. Creative Computing called it "one of the most unusual and useful programs I have seen in a long time"; the New York Times thought it was mostly for children making crude novelties, which was exactly the point.

It was a monster. Ports followed for MS-DOS, the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bits, then the Macintosh in 1986. In 1985 it and Ghostbusters were reportedly the two most pirated Commodore 64 programs, it sat on the Softsel best-seller list for more than 120 weeks, Brøderbund had sold 800,000 copies by 1987, passed a million in 1988, and in 1987 the program alone accounted for four percent of the entire United States software market. The Print Shop Companion in 1985 added calendars and a Creature Maker, and graphics libraries kept arriving into the 1990s from Brøderbund and others, while user groups traded homemade clip art on disk. When Unison World cloned it as PrintMaster so closely that the programmers forgot to change "Return" to "Enter" for the IBM, Brøderbund won the 1986 lawsuit.

The nineties were the banner decade. The New Print Shop came in 1988, and Print Shop Deluxe in 1993 brought a fully graphical interface to Windows and Macs, followed by Ensemble editions that bundled the program with its libraries on one CD. The series was 29 percent of Brøderbund's revenue in fiscal 1992, had passed four million units that year, outselling Carmen Sandiego, and reached ten million by 2001. This was the version in the school computer lab, printing signs for the dance and the science fair. The name never died: a Windows 7 release came in 2010 and a Mac version in 2017, still making greeting cards for people who never learned InDesign.