Dear Tomás,
My understanding of this matter is that there is actually very little
information on the subject because it is a very recent chapter in our
history.
I guess you and your students will have to write most of this history
yourselves, digging for primary sources.
There was a huge impact on the firms that sold pre-press machinery and
supplies.
You could look into that. Dig up trade publications and advertising,
trade fair materials and the like.
Some of those firms started selling computers and software.
I remember there was this company here in Portugal that, in the year
they started selling Aldus PageMaker, they made so much money that they
decided to buy expensive gifts for the best customers, just to cut down
the profit and pay less taxes.
There was also a huge impact in pre-press jobs.
In the most extraordinary display of euphemism I have ever known, the
government here called those lost jobs "negative sector evolutions", in
this case the "sector" was the printing industry.
In the '90s I was a teacher in what you might call a printing and
pre-press learning center.
We trained in DTP a lot of people who lost their jobs to DTP.
So I guess you can also find information regarding this, if it is in the
scope of your project.
Another interesting aspect was the impact this had on the use of letter
forms.
I think I still have a copy of Letraset's Letrastudio software. I
remember the manual had an introduction by Herb Lubalin, saying this was
an amazing tool, but also a dangerous one because with it you could ruin
typography. And people actually did. Back then I was still in college,
and we could always spot DTP newbies because they would show up with
distorted type.
So another aspect of this history is the impact on typography, and that
can be found at least as a chapter in the history of typography.
I will look into my archives for more information, but I think this
history is yet to be written.
Best regards,
Carlos
On 2015-05-12 02:17, Tomas Garcia Ferrari wrote:
> A postgraduate student at our University is researching on the history
> of
> Desktop Publishing (DTP) – the Desktop Publishing revolution – and we
> are
> finding some difficulties to obtain relevant and valid sources of
> information. Most of the material we could find is from the ’80s or
> ’90s
> and coming from a myriad of different sources without much academic
> weight.
> One source we have found is the *“Desktop Publishing”* chapter by H. A.
> Tucker in *“Advances in Computer Graphics III (Focus on Computer
> Graphics)”*
> (printed in 1988), but having only this is not providing a lot of
> material
> to work on.
>
> Most probable is the case that we are just blind by ignorance. Hence,
> to
> ask in this forum could bring us to light. Is there any source that you
> could recommend?
>
> Best,
> Tomás
>
> --
> Tomás García Ferrari
> Senior Lecturer
>
> Department of Computer Science
> The University of Waikato
> New Zealand
>
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Web: http://cs.waikato.ac.nz/~tomasgf
>
>
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