In the first part of this article I looked at what I saw were the key developments that took place in the late 1960s and the 1970s that changed the face of the printing and publishing industry. In fact this period was an era of significant technological change that really set the scene for the developments that were to follow on in the 1980s.

In 1979 Scitex introduced the color editing and page assembly workstation. This started a major area of competition that continued for the next decade when Crosfield, Hell and Dainippon Screen also introduced products doing the same type of work. All these workstations used proprietary hardware and software technology to allow high-resolution color images to be retouched and assembled into pages. These new color workstations allowed major changes in the type of work being processed in that they allowed pages to be assembled for advertisements and articles that did not exist in real life and could not be created in any other way. At the same time as this was happening in print other companies like Quantel were changing the way television advertising was created by retouching and assembling video images into advertisements. These developments caused a major change in the way advertising was created and used and opened up new forms of creativity. The devices however were too expensive to purchase and operate to be put into the hands of creative professionals and were only used within special service companies. These companies would have special rooms with the equipment that would allow creative staff to work alongside an operator in building up the advertisements. Companies in this area were very profitable for many years and operators of such color workstations were the high paid elite of the industry.

In the 1970s new concepts of computing and how to use computers had been created at the Xerox PARC facility. One of these developments was the Alto workstation that was the first WYSIWYG display computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). PARC hoped to use these to create a community of researchers and many of the workstations were installed with universities around the USA. I was lucky to see the Alto in action at MIT in Cambridge, MA and was like all others who saw it impressed by the potential it offered for the future. The product however never became a successful commercial venture but spawned an industry of new workstation companies in the early 1980s often set up by ex-PARC or by offshoots from major universities. These companies used the same WYSIWYG and GUI approaches but mainly built the workstations around new Motorola 68000 family microprocessors that became available at that time plus in most cases the Unix operating system. These companies included Perq, Apollo Computer, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems, and they opened up new business areas in research, CAD and publishing and printing. They were however aimed at the professional users and universities. A number of new companies started within the print related markets to offer technical documentation and high-end book composition systems and they used these new workstations. This included companies like Xyvision, Texet, Royce, Mentor Graphics, Miles 33 and others. Most of these have disappeared today.