Excerpted from my blog post 1-24-09:
I remember the day when my friend and college newspaper editor Roxanne when to the graphic arts department with our 5-1/4" diskette of newspaper copy, done on an Apple II-series computer, using various arcane codes to format the style of the text thereon, and saw this little beige box that the graphic-arts guys were playing with. One of them called us over and said, "Hey, check this out."
We liked the general look of the computer, and the mouse was a cute little innovation, but neither Roxie or I were particularly impressed until the guy brought up a MacWord document, showing us how the text could be formatted right there on the screen. You could change the style from bold to italic to underline by highlighting the word or sentence -- and clicking on one command.
At that instant, aliens could have come from other galaxies and neither of us would have noticed. This was incredible. As I said to Roxie later walking back to the newspaper office, "At the very least, this is going to knock the bottom out of the pre-press industry." (This was confirmed some years later, when I worked at The PennySaver: they switched from these huge, clunky typsetter machines that needed photo-mechanical-transfer developers to print copy, to Macintoshes with laser-printers.)
Been a Mac man ever since.
I remember the day when my friend and college newspaper editor Roxanne when to the graphic arts department with our 5-1/4" diskette of newspaper copy, done on an Apple II-series computer, using various arcane codes to format the style of the text thereon, and saw this little beige box that the graphic-arts guys were playing with. One of them called us over and said, "Hey, check this out."
We liked the general look of the computer, and the mouse was a cute little innovation, but neither Roxie or I were particularly impressed until the guy brought up a MacWord document, showing us how the text could be formatted right there on the screen. You could change the style from bold to italic to underline by highlighting the word or sentence -- and clicking on one command.
At that instant, aliens could have come from other galaxies and neither of us would have noticed. This was incredible. As I said to Roxie later walking back to the newspaper office, "At the very least, this is going to knock the bottom out of the pre-press industry." (This was confirmed some years later, when I worked at The PennySaver: they switched from these huge, clunky typsetter machines that needed photo-mechanical-transfer developers to print copy, to Macintoshes with laser-printers.)
Been a Mac man ever since.
