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Around 1987/88, I was finishing college and worked at a copy/print/desktop publishing business. We had, IIRC, Mac SE 30s with Radius full page displays and seve
by cmpalmer52 2y ago
Around 1987/88, I was finishing college and worked at a copy/print/desktop publishing business. We had, IIRC, Mac SE 30s with Radius full page displays and several laser printers (in addition to high volume duplexing copiers and a deal with a full print shop for larger runs).
Adobe PageMaker and Illustrator were the workhorses. I did the design and layout for newsletters, posters, business cards, menus, invitations, resumes, or whatever someone wanted.
The real kludge was the scanner we had on the Macs. It replaced the print head on an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. You fed it what you wanted to scan and it “printed” over it, scanning it at 72 dpi, which wouldn’t pick up much detail. So we would blow up images on the copier, scan the large pictures, trace it into an EPS file in Illustrator, then use it for the client’s materials.
My speciality was turning Polaroid photos of gas stations/convenience stores into architectural style line drawings for a firm that did graphics and signage. Photo -> blow up on copier -> scan in multiple parts into grainy BW scans -> tile the pieces back together -> trace in Illustrator. They would then take my 11”x17” black and white line drawings and their designer would color them and introduce the proposed graphics. As time consuming as it was, it saved them money to hire us to do it and the results were pretty impressive - particularly since my artistic skills were minimal.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI think you mean Aldus PageMaker. ;-)
- cmpalmer52 2y agoYes, you are correct.
- joezydeco 2y agoThunderscan? There's some neat history behind that project. https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html
- cmpalmer52 2y agoThat was it. We squeezed every trick out of that thing.
- scelerat 2y agoI had a thunderscan. I spent weeks scanning the entirety of the loose-leaf AD&D 2e Monstrous Compendium and uploaded the 72dpi b&w monster images to my local Hermes bbs as PICTs. I don’t know why. It made sense to me at the time.
- r4nd_f 2y ago>It made sense to me at the time. Any reason to self-host copies of something digital always make sense ;)