thebitterguy

I didn't see this one, but it's good that someone realized that when you are comparing yourself to another product, you need to sell your advantages.

The PC/Mac commercials do a good job of that. All sorts of neat advantages that the Mac OS has over Windows, delivered by two cute meat puppets. Putting up a big sign that asks people how much they're willing to pay for all that is a smart idea on Microsoft's part.

Way better than those Jerry Seinfeld ads. Whoa.

Let’s go back to nostalgia, y’all. You know what terrifies me? Sets my bowels to quivering like not quite set Jell-o? The thought that someone who reads this won’t know what I’m gonna talk about in a second.

Because I’m gonna get old here, folks. I’m going back a couple decades, easy. To where? Computer camp, which mostly consisted of repeasts of episodes of Bits n' Bytes and showings of Tron and Wargamrs.

Back in the early, early days (i.e. the early 80s) YHB was something of the nerd. He grew out of that quick, but always retained in himself a love for interesting software. And in that epoch, no piece of software was more interesting than Print Shop (or The Print Shop, if you prefer).

Print Shop was a piece of software produced by Broderbund (and how friggin SHOCKED am I that they still exist, even if as a shell) that allowed you to print things. Pretty things. You could do greeting cards and flyers and seating markers and all sorts of neat things. Admittedly, not that impressive in this day of DTP programs proliferating, but back then I was impressed.

The highlight, and one of those things that’s been eliminated by the advance of technology (much like album covers) was the banner. Printer paper, you see, was once available only as one single sheet of paper, fed through the printer (the Dot Matrix printer!) on spoked wheels. As such, you had to dis-assemble the paper once it was printed out. This made printing, say, 20 pages of fiction very difficult. However, it did allow you to print long banners, which would be used to wish someone a happy birthday, a good trip, a happy anniversary, or a happy retirement.

This is a lost art today. With the advent of affordable inkjet and laser printers we’ve gained many wonderful things (admittedly, that includes paper that doesn’t require manual labour to print out one sheet), but I occasionally miss being able to print out a banner, or a sign with big blocky text.

Dot Matrix printers had a certain hard elegance about them, a rough edged blue collar sense of efficiency. Admittedly, they were noisy, but even that was a sign they were working. A laser printer’s hum can indicate it’s working, it isn’t working, or that it’s just on.