Released in early 1984, it was the first successful desktop computer with a graphical user interface – icons, buttons and menus – and saw the transformation of computer use from an area dominated by developers and code boffins, to a tool that creatives could use to display and edit their visual work.
One such feature was the WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – feature, which meant, for the first time, the ability to display a page on screen as it would appear in print.
A host of applications – with the Adobe suite ultimately perhaps the most famous example – would subsequently transform the lives of printers across the world.
Simon Eccles, longstanding print industry journalist and a regular Printweek contributor, recalled being interested in Apple’s technology from the start.
“I was very interested in the potential for computers to revolutionise the business, despite the indifference of some [trade magazine] editors, and the ambivalence of the very powerful print unions,” he said.
Eccles’ first encounter with Apple was a visit to their headquarters in 1982, to write a feature on Apple’s “very expensive” predecessor to the Mac, the Lisa, which had more power and a larger screen for typesetting and page layout.
At the time, Apple UK was based in a cul-de-sac next to a dump in Hemel Hempstead.
“The big change that got Macintosh noticed in printing circles came at the beginning of 1985,” Eccles said.
This was the release of the Apple Desktop Publishing System (DTP), made up of Macintosh computer, Aldus PageMaker layout software, Adobe’s PostScript software to communicate with printers, the affordable Apple LaserWriter printer, based on Canon technology with an Adobe RIP, and Linotype outline fonts.
“I rang my contact [at Apple’s UK PR firm] within the hour. ‘I thought we might be hearing from you first!’ he said.
“This was the true Macintosh revolution, the Apple DTP system of 1985.”
Just a few years later Paul Sherfield, founder of the Missing Horse Consultancy and veteran of the pre-press trade was one of the first to adopt the Macintosh system.In the late 1980s, Sherfield said, he was working in a sheetfed printing company in central London.
At this time – 1987 – the Macintosh II was launched: capable of running an external colour screen of 13 inches, compared to the nine-inch mono screen of the original Mac, and featuring advancements in graphical and computing power, it was, according to Eccles, “the first really usable Mac for serious publishing.”
Sherfield said: “Suddenly all these design agencies were putting Macs in – so we had to catch up very, very quickly.
“We didn’t have pre-press – everybody used outside platemakers, of course, in those days. So I did some research, and in 1990 we decided to put pre-press in, even though in those days it was the cost of a two-colour B1 press.”
At the time, pre-press was dominated by Israeli manufacturer Scitex, which was selling large page make-up terminals for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“I was confident by then that Macs were going to take over the world, so I put in a mixture of Macs and one of the high-end Scitex terminals.”
The company’s pre-press operators took quickly to the Macs, with hours of labour imposing film on individual pages cut instantly.
George Berg, former managing director of London’s FMG, recalled his days as a litho planner: “Prior to Macs, it was all done by hand, very laboriously, and very slowly.
“We used to make those colour separations on film for the publisher, and it was a very labour-intensive and expensive process – we were charging hundreds of pounds per page.”
The amazing increase in speed, however, also meant the collapse of the typesetting industry.
“There were dozens of typsetters in SE1 and EC1, and within very few years, they were all gone,” Sherfield said.
Early software programs such as Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress transformed printers’ lives, cutting turnaround times to a tiny fraction of their previous totals, and cutting costs too.
Sherfield added: “If you were a designer in the beginning of the 80s, you’d have reams and reams of galleys, which would be cut up, with headlines – headline typesetting could be a pound a word. You had to work it all out, sit on a drawing board.
“In the 70s, I worked as a print buyer for British Airways. For a 300-page, one-million copy run holiday brochure, it had a 16-week production cycle – our big aim was to get 16 pages proofed a week!”
