"Web extras" relating to 2018 and 2019 Annals of the History of Computing issues on desktop publishing

"Web extras" relating to 2018 and 2019 Annals special issues on desktop publishing (DTP)

Categories below: ⦿ Special issue contents for issues 1 and 2, etc.; ⦿ corrections for issue 1; ⦿ corrections for issue 2; ⦿ corrections for papers in other issues; ⦿ May 2017 DTP pioneers meeting transcripts and group photo; ⦿ related oral histories for the DTP pioneers; and ⦿ additional content related to the papers published in the special issues.

This web page will be updated as new documents and videos are available.
[Send notes on errors, etc., to dave.walden.family@gmail.com with the subject field "DTP extras page".]

The first of these two special issues was published as Annals issue 3 of 2018. The second issue was published as issue 3 of 2019. The papers in the first issue deal with technology developments that led up to desktop publishing. The papers in the second issue deal with the development of the desktop publishing technology and business itself. Because of too much content for issue 2, several issue 2 papers are being published in other Annals issues.

⦿ Special issue contents

Issue 1 (Annals vol. 40, no. 3, July-September 2018)
Desktop Publishing: Laying the Foundation — Burton Grad and David Hemmendinger
Rocappi: Computerizing the Publishing Industry — Jonathan W. Seybold
How Atex Helped an Industry Change the World — Douglas Drane
More about Atex — Jonathan Seybold
The Xerox Alto Publishing Platform — Robert F. Sproull
How Modeless Editing Came To Be — Lawrence G. Tesler
The Origins of PostScript — John E. Warnock
TeX: A Branch of Desktop Publishing, Part 1 — Barbara Beeton, Karl Berry, and David Walden
Interview with Charles Bigelow — David Walden
Issue 2 (Annals vol. 41, no. 3, July-September 2019)
Desktop Publishing: Building the Industry — Burton Grad and David Hemmendinger
Seybold Publications and Seminars — Jonathan Seybold
Founding and Growing Adobe Systems Inc. — John Warnock and Charles Geschke
Paul Brainerd, Aldus Corporation and the Desktop Publishing Revolution — Suzanne Crocker
Desktop Publishing: The Killer App That Saved the Macintosh — John Scull and Hansen Hsu
Interview with Tim Gill (Quark) — Jay Nelson
Frame Technology and FrameMaker — David J. Murray
The Ventura Story — Lee Lorenzen
TeX: A Branch of Desktop Publishing, Part 2 — Barbara Beeton, Karl Berry, and David Walden (published in Annals vol. 41, no. 2, April-June 2019)
Issue 3 (Annals vol. 42, no. 1, January-March 2020)
Font Technology and Marketing — Burton Grad and David Hemmendinger
Font Wars parts 1 and 2 — Charles Bigelow
Oral History of Liz Bond Crews — Paul McJones
Interview with Larry Bond — David Walden
Interleaf, Inc., 1981-2000 — Mark Dionne and David Walden

⦿ Corrections to issue 1

Page 5, the URL in the line above the Acknowledgements: the URL should be history.computer.org (no letter f)
Page 9, third line, "My father saw was not what was being done, but what could be done.": the first "was" should be dropped
Page 26, third paragraph after "Beginning Atex" head: "this brother" should be "his brother".
Page 35, third paragraph after "Growth, Sale to Kodak, and Later" head: "be involved printing- and pub-" should be "be involved with printing-and pub-"
Page 36, reference 4: there is a spurious comma before the opening double quote (``, emails ...), and a spurious period and comma before the closing double quote (23.,''.)
Page 36, reference 5: there is a spurious semicolon after the closing double quote (XyWrite,''; -> XyWrite,'')
Page 36, reference 7: "Marlborouch" should be "Marlborough"
Page 36: reference 16: spurious semicolon (History,''; -> History,'')
Page 71, fourth line after "PostScript Minus 1" heading: "Boudelaire" should be "Baudelaire".
Page 71, last paragraph: "SmallTalk" instead of "Smalltalk" (as on, e.g., page 65)
Page 73, middle: "user would be able understand it", missing word "to"
Page 74, last paragraph: "PostScipt" should be "PostScript" in "QuickDraw-to-PostScipt converter"
Page 76, reference 6: "vol. 156, no. 4" should not be in italics
Page 103, reference 6: "Association" should be "Society"
Page 103, reference 14: the author names should come before the title
Page 103, reference 12: "thesis M.S. thesis" has a redundant "thesis"
Page 103, reference 16: "spines" should be "splines"
Page 109, first line: "principle of computers" should be "principles of computers"
Page 110, second to last line from bottom (in caption): "structure data type" should be "a structure data type"

⦿ Corrections to issue 2

Page 26, 10 lines from the bottom of the right column: "Belville" should be "Belleville"
Page 28, 11 and 12 lines from the bottom of the right column: "Belville" should be "Belleville"
Page 41, 6 and 7 lines from the bottom of the right column: John Knoll was an employee of Industrial Light and Magic; Thomas Knoll was a graduate student

⦿ Corrections to papers in other issues

TeX part 2, vol. 41, no. 2, page 40, reference 1: "vol. 41, no. 3" should be "vol. 40, no. 3"

⦿ May 2017 DTP pioneers meeting, transcripts, and group photo

The three special issues grew out of a May 2017 two-day meeting of desktop publishing pioneers held at the Computer History Museum (CHM). There have been two anticipatory write-ups since the meeting and before publication of the first special issue: in the Annals (search for "Events & Sightings") and in TUGboat, the journal of the TeX Users Group.

Videos and transcripts from the meeting are available on the CHM web server:

Purpose and Introductions of Participants: transcript; video
Technology in the 1960s: transcript; video
Technology in the 1970s: transcript; video
Technology in the 1980s: transcript; video
Seybold Newsletter and Seminars: transcript; video
Adobe: transcript; video
Ventura, Aldus and Apple: transcript; video
Atex and TeX: transcript; video
Impact on the Future of Desktop Publishing: transcript; video

Group photo

© Douglas Fairbairn Photography; courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Left to right in the photo: Hansen Hsu (CHM historian), Mike Humphries (CHM Software Industry Special Interest Group, SISIG), John Markoff (New York Times and CHM), Matthew Kirschenbaum (historian, University of Maryland), Ike Nassi (CHM trustee), Marc Weber (CHM Internet Curator), Tom Haigh (historian, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee), Liz Crews (was Liz Bond, Xerox PARC and Adobe), Larry Tesler (Xerox PARC and Apple), Paul McJones (CHM Software Preservation Group), Butler Lampson (Xerox PARC), Paul Brainerd (Aldus), John Shoch (Xerox PARC, CHM trustee), Johm Warnock (Xerox PARC, Adobe), Lee Lorenzen (Ventura), Charles Geschke (Xerox PARC, Adobe), Charles Simonyi (Xerox PARC, Microsoft), Bob Sproull (Xerox PARC), Don Knuth (Stanford, TeX), Jonathan Seybold (ROCAPPI, Seybold Publications and Seminars), Chuck Bigelow (Bigelow & Holmes type design studio), Richard Ying (Atex), Burt Grad (co-founder SISIG), Dave Walden (independent scholar), John Holler (CHM CEO until June 2017), David Brock (CHM Center for Software History).

⦿ Related oral histories (and other writings) of desktop computing pioneers

An interview of Chuck Bigelow is published elsewhere in DTP special issue 1
Chuck Bigelow was also interviewed at the Computer History Museum in May 2017: video ; transcript
Another Bigelow interview
Chuck Bigelow's partner Kris Holmes interview
Paul Brainerd transcript
Liz Crews was interviewed at the Computer History Museum in May 2017: transcript; video
Charles Geschke and John Warnock on the founding of Adobe transcript
Charles Geschke on lessons from his life in business video (on the CHM Youtube channel)
Steve Kirsch, part 1 video transcript
Steve Kirsch, part 2 video transcript
Donald Knuth list; audio and visual items are in the list below written items; one of the Knuth interviews in that list was done at the Computer History Museum
Butler Lampson transcript
Lee Lorenzen was interviewed at the Computer History Museum in May 2017:transcript; video
John Scull, part 1 video transcript
John Scull, part 2 video transcript
Jonathan Seybold was interviewed at the Computer History Museum in May 2017: video transcript
Robert Sproull wrote the following paper: Publishing a Computer Graphics Book With Prototype Desktop Publishing Tools which was published in issue 2018-4 of the Annals
Gary Starkweather transcript
Larry Tesler transcript
Charles Thacker transcript
... are there others?

⦿ Extras for various articles

Extras for Jonathan Seybold papers on Rocappi and the Seybold Reports

Rocappi

Some background on the development of computer typesetting
About a possible link between Rocappi and SGML
About the Rocappi team
About Rocappi Ltd.
A cost comparison of "electronic composition"; Jonathan Seybold provided the examples on pages 5-12 using the criteria listed on page 4
John Seybold 1984 book on The World of Digital Typesetting; the 1985 supplement to the book is at the same location
A paper about a Rocappi system by John Seybold,
Electroinic Publishing in Printing, Proceedings of a Symposium, June 15-16, 1967, U.S. Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, special publication 295, issued February 1968

Seybold Reports and Seminars
Seybold Seminars '88 issue of Seybold Report on Publishing Systems. Thank you to the Joss Group (www.thejossgroup.com) which has given permission for posting of these Seybold Sermins '88 materials that were published in The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems.

Extras relating to the two Atex anecdotes

Extras relating to Xerox PARC

Lots of documentation is available about Xerox PARC, which figures prominently in several of the papers in the special issues and in the meeting transcripts; see, for instance:

Extras (including any corrections) for TeX history paper(s) by Beeton, Berry, and Walden

See tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19

Extras for Frame Technology and FrameMaker paper by David J. Murray

Extras for Font Wars parts 1 and 2 by Charles Bigelow

See history.computer.org/annals/dtp/fw

Extras for Interleaf paper by Mark Dionne and David Walden

Archive of Interleaf materials

Another text processing system

The Scribe system

Relevant prior Annals special issue

Annals volume 28, number 4 — PC Software: Word Processing for Everyone issue table of contents

Relevant new (2019) book

Frank Romano has written a book titled History of Desktop Publishing, Oak Knoll Press, New Castle, Deleware.