Printing a Modern Publication with Newsroom on a Commodore 64
Ever wonder how newspaper editors of the past created their print layouts? This write-up shows you how it was done.
In ye olden days, print publications employed dedicated technicians to layout the type and everything else going on each page, on rigid plates, that would then go to the presses. It was therefore something of a regression when early computers came along, as they lacked the GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) necessary to layout pagesvisually. Word processors were a bit like Notepad today and couldn't handle much more than plain text. In the '80s, Springboard Software released The Newsroom, which was software developed for print publication layout. Out of a sense of nostalgia, ClassicHasClass decided to create a modern print using The Newsroom.
ClassicHasClass was no stranger to print layouts before tackling this project. They worked on both their high school and university newspapers in the '90s, when both computers and software had a bit more power to offerthan they did in the '80s. But their first exposure was with The Newsroom in the '80s on a Commodore 64 purchased by their parents. At that time, they were using the software for fun—everything a computer could do, including something as utilitarian as print layout, was exciting and novel in those early days. So this project let ClassicHasClass revisit their childhood.
By modern standards, The Newsroom is both very rudimentary and very difficult to use. Microsoft Word is more powerful and has been for decades. But when it hit the market, The Newsroom was quite sophisticated. It had a GUI interface that let editors create print layouts, complete with headlines, different type faces, and even images. ClassicHasClass's lengthy and entertaining write-up goes into great detail about how the software works and its various quirks.
Producing a print with modern content (including modern photos) wasn't an easy task. For example, ClassicHasClass wanted to include a photo of Janet Yellen to keep the publication topical. But getting that photo into The Newsroom was a big undertaking. The Commodore 64 didn't have hardware to make data transmission easy and wasn't designed to display photos. ClassicHasClass had to take the photo, scale it down, convert it to grayscale, perform dithering, save it in the appropriate format, and then transfer via a serial connection from theirmodern computer to the Commodore 64. Getting the finished layout from the Commodore 64 to the modern computer came with similar difficulties.
But in the end, ClassicHasClass was able to print the "8-Bit Edition" of their modern publication. It may look a little outdated, but it does a great job demonstrating how The Newsroom worked and this write-up shows how editors of the '80s would have done their work.