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That’s an interesting question and one I don’t know the answer to. PageMaker is the first serious DTP package, but it wasn’t capable of laying out a magazine in

That’s an interesting question and one I don’t know the answer to. PageMaker is the first serious DTP package, but it wasn’t capable of laying out a magazine in 1985: for one thing MacUser is in colour! The Macintosh II with colour support didn’t appear until 1987.

gav 5y ago
Before DTP, paste up involve pasting content onto boards that were then photographed (with a stat camera) to create film negatives for printing plates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwrePe4-ID4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwrePe4-ID4
- erickhill 5y ago
  That's exactly how we made my high-school newspaper. Then about 1987, when I was a junior, the first day of Journalism class we walked into the room and discovered our world had changed forever. There were now two Macintosh computers (one with a gigantic 20MB hard drive). We'd stepped into the future.
  - User23 5y ago
    The future back then was you printed the proofs on a LaserWriter and then took those to the dark room. And maybe had a halftone screen if your school was fancy.
- atombender 5y ago
  What's not clear to me is what happens after. It looks to me like photographing the end result would result in a lot of visible artifacts from the glue and bits of paper? (I watched the video without audio, so maybe they explained this.) Maybe this is just the process used for designing the layout, which is then used to re-flow and re-print all the "fragments" so they can be remounted and photographed cleanly?
  - gav 5y ago
    The board shown was camera-ready and would be photographed like that, though maybe after cleaning off some glue with a rubber cement eraser. It's a monochrome camera that will only pick up blacks and reds, the lines are drawn with blue pencil so they won't be visible. It will photograph cleanly.
    - atombender 5y ago
      So the process would not work for full-colour magazines like MacUser?
      - gav 5y ago
        Same process, you need to repeat it for each color that you would want printed. This video shows a bit of the process such as the Rubylith sheets used to create masks for each color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxddg3dNKgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxddg3dNKgw
anthk 5y ago
A lot of magazines were in B/W in the 80's except for the cover. For newspapers, even in late 90's a lot of them were just in B/W.
Someone 5y ago
Utter nitpick: the original 128k Mac had color support (http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/QuickDraw/QuickDraw-19.html#HEADING19-75 http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...) Of course, the screen was monochrome black and white, so you’d have to print things to see them, and I’m not aware of any printer driver ever supporting it (Color QuickDraw, when it arrived, didn’t build on this, as far as I know). Chances also are this part of the code was less well exercised than other parts. It may have been buggy. On the plus side, colors were 32-bit (see http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/QuickDraw/QuickDraw-27.html http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc..., where both fgColor and bkColor are 32 bits), but as indicated in the first link, you could only record a fixed set of 8 colors in pictures. (Links are to a 1996 book, but that info was present in the phone book edition of Inside Macintosh (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Inside_Macintosh.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...), too)
hedgehog 5y ago
I don't know specifically but this prepress history gives a qualitative idea of how it was probably done: https://www.prepressure.com/prepress/history/events-1980 https://www.prepressure.com/prepress/history/events-1980
User23 5y ago
Color displays weren’t necessary for color offset printing.

gav 5y ago

Before DTP, paste up involve pasting content onto boards that were then photographed (with a stat camera) to create film negatives for printing plates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwrePe4-ID4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwrePe4-ID4

erickhill 5y ago
That's exactly how we made my high-school newspaper. Then about 1987, when I was a junior, the first day of Journalism class we walked into the room and discovered our world had changed forever. There were now two Macintosh computers (one with a gigantic 20MB hard drive). We'd stepped into the future.
- User23 5y ago
  The future back then was you printed the proofs on a LaserWriter and then took those to the dark room. And maybe had a halftone screen if your school was fancy.
atombender 5y ago
What's not clear to me is what happens after. It looks to me like photographing the end result would result in a lot of visible artifacts from the glue and bits of paper? (I watched the video without audio, so maybe they explained this.) Maybe this is just the process used for designing the layout, which is then used to re-flow and re-print all the "fragments" so they can be remounted and photographed cleanly?
- gav 5y ago
  The board shown was camera-ready and would be photographed like that, though maybe after cleaning off some glue with a rubber cement eraser. It's a monochrome camera that will only pick up blacks and reds, the lines are drawn with blue pencil so they won't be visible. It will photograph cleanly.
  - atombender 5y ago
    So the process would not work for full-colour magazines like MacUser?
    - gav 5y ago
      Same process, you need to repeat it for each color that you would want printed. This video shows a bit of the process such as the Rubylith sheets used to create masks for each color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxddg3dNKgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxddg3dNKgw

anthk 5y ago

A lot of magazines were in B/W in the 80's except for the cover. For newspapers, even in late 90's a lot of them were just in B/W.

Someone 5y ago

Utter nitpick: the original 128k Mac had color support (http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/QuickDraw/QuickDraw-19.html#HEADING19-75 http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...) Of course, the screen was monochrome black and white, so you’d have to print things to see them, and I’m not aware of any printer driver ever supporting it (Color QuickDraw, when it arrived, didn’t build on this, as far as I know). Chances also are this part of the code was less well exercised than other parts. It may have been buggy. On the plus side, colors were 32-bit (see http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/QuickDraw/QuickDraw-27.html http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc..., where both fgColor and bkColor are 32 bits), but as indicated in the first link, you could only record a fixed set of 8 colors in pictures. (Links are to a 1996 book, but that info was present in the phone book edition of Inside Macintosh (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Inside_Macintosh.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...), too)

hedgehog 5y ago

I don't know specifically but this prepress history gives a qualitative idea of how it was probably done: https://www.prepressure.com/prepress/history/events-1980 https://www.prepressure.com/prepress/history/events-1980

User23 5y ago

Color displays weren’t necessary for color offset printing.