On May 22 and 23, 2017, the Computer History Museum held a two-day meeting with more than 15 pioneering participants involved in the creation of the desktop publishing industry. There were a series of moderated group sessions and one-on-one oral histories of some of the participants, all of which were video recorded and transcribed.
Building on this meeting, three special issues of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing were published, telling the stories of people, technologies, companies, and industries — far too much for me to cover here, so I will provide these links:
- Annals vol. 40, no. 3 (Jul-Sep 2018): “Desktop Publishing: Laying the Foundation” (Rocappi, Atex (more), Xerox Alto publishing platform, modeless editing, PUB, and Gypsy, Postscript, TeX part 1, Charles Bigelow interview).
- Annals vol. 41, no. 2 (Apr-Jun 2019): TeX part 2.
- Annals vol. 41, no. 3 (Jul-Sep 2019): “Desktop Publishing: Building the Industry” (Seybold, Adobe, Aldus, Macintosh, Tim Gill interview (Quark), Frame, Ventura).
- Annals vol. 42, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2020): “Etc.” (font technology and marketing, font wars parts 1 and 2, Liz Bond Crews interview, Larry Bohn interview, Interleaf).
- Web extras: Dave Walden’s page of corrections, links to the original video recordings and transcriptions, and legend for the group photograph heading this post.
Last but not least, I had the pleasure of interviewing Liz Bond Crews, who worked first at Xerox and then Adobe to forge relationships and understanding between the purveyors of new technology (laser printers and PostScript) and the type designers, typographers, and designers who adopted that technology. An edited version of that interview appears in the third special issue of Annals:
- The Advent of Digital Typography: Oral history of Liz Bond Crews. Annals of the History of Computing, vol 42, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2020) (open access).
- Crews, Liz oral history. May 24, 2017, Computer History Museum: transcript, catalog number 102738271; video recording, catalog number 102738272.