December 12: Our 18th anniversary!

[ktinkel]

The DTP Forum began on CompuServe on December 12, 1989.

Since then we have gone through many changes — from all-ASCII to CompuServe Information Manager (and for many of us, off-line readers like TapCIS), and then to web-based CompuServe. Finally, in 2004, we moved here, to our own independent web site.

When we began, page layout software was the big issue; we eagerly awaited the next updates to PageMaker, QuarkXPress, Ventura Publishing, and other programs, many of them virtually forgotten. But we used to get excited about updates in those days. Competition was fierce, between Aldus (later Adobe) and Quark and between users of the different programs.

Graphics programs were also important in those days, especially Adobe Illustrator, Aldus FreeHand (little sister of Fontographer from Altsys), and Corel DRAW.

Fonts have always been part of the forum, though never so contentiously as in the early 90s when we had huge “font wars” over clones and knockoffs, formats, price, and more. Typography was hot; how many threads did we have on “desert island” and “most hated” fonts? On correct spacing and settings to ensure it? On typeface selections? Too many to count.

Then color and prepress became the hot topic. Photoshop had designers doing the sort of work (perhaps not the quality) as had been done by experts at Scitex workstations or using old-fashioned cameras at the print shops. Some of us remember when the first affordable ($2,400) color scanner came on the market. We avidly discussed trapping, rich blacks, halftone standards, and other topics that not too much earlier had been the province of experts at our printers’ offices.

Later, as designers began to design web pages, we started talking about HTML, and learned to cheat it with clever (now rightfully despised) stratagems as the transparent pixel spacer (for indents and line-spacing), the abuse of tables for layout, “blink,” and more.

Whew! We should have a slightly belated 18th birthday party.

Bubbles, anyone?