How Desktop Publishing created the Web - Web Directions

• By: John
• Tweet: @johnallsopp
• November 24, 2014

Karen Mcgrane’s recent Beyond Tellerand presentation, Content in a Zombie Apocalpypse talks about the impact of laser printing on the rise (and nature) of the Web. She observes

Arguably, the laser printer is the most important component of the entire personal computing revolution. Demand for laser printers, demand for desktop publishing, is what drove people to start buying Apple computers and to start buying PCs, and to buy laser printers, and to print out really badly formatted newsletters and to use too many fonts

I’ve also been thinking about the significance of Desktop Publishing for the Web for a while now. And like Karen, though for slightly different reasons, I think without DTP, the Web would not exist (something like it most probably would but it would have come about quite some time later).

For those who weren’t around in the 1980s, Desktop Publishing really took off with the Macintosh and the laser printer, and saw an explosion in niche magazines and publications. They weren’t typically as glossy as the mainstream magazines, like Vogue, which predated them (though out of the DTP revolution came magazines like The Face, which became a global phenomenon). But Desktop Published magazines democratised publishing, and created thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of digitally savvy editors and illustrators and photographers. Their work is for the most part lost and forgotten, but this army of creatives who could use computers to design and publish things were around in the early 1990s, as the Web took off, and filled the Web with (almost entirely) free stuff to read and look at.

I’ll contend if there’d been no DTP revolution, there’d have been no digitally capable content creators to fill that early Web with content, and so no content to draw the Web’s early adopters to it. And so most likely no Web. Tim Berner’s-Lee may well of course created his World Wide Web Project. But there’s every chance it would have languished like dozens of other similar systems.

The unintended consequences of a revolution that was never intended, since laser printers were originally designed to be a cheaper, faster alternative to earlier office printers. I wonder what unintended revolutions lie as yet unimagined inside seemingly mundane innovations all around us?

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