Timeworks Publisher

~ the obit ~

This one was finished before I owned a computer. Timeworks Publisher belongs to a period I can only read about, the stretch between 1987 and 1994 when desktop publishing was a genuinely new capability rather than a menu inside a word processor, and when the machines it ran on had less memory than a modern browser tab.

The thing worth knowing about it is not what it did. Every DTP program of the era did roughly the same job, which was to pour text into frames and wrap it around pictures so that the printed result did not look typewritten. What made this one matter is who was allowed to use it. Ventura Publisher and PageMaker were professional tools at professional prices, running on professional hardware. Timeworks was a deliberate copy of Ventura sold to everyone else.

It came out of GST, a group of computer companies founded in Cambridge, England in June 1979 by Jeff Fenton. GST had spent the early eighties doing contract work for other people's hardware, writing an operating system that Sinclair rejected and then a word processor called 1st Word that Atari liked enough to bundle with every Atari ST for the machine's first two years. That deal made GST the leading software supplier on the ST platform, and in 1987 it used that position to ship its first desktop publishing application.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the trick ~

The engineering achievement was not a feature. It was an absence. Timeworks Publisher would run on a computer with no hard disk.

That sounds minor now and it was the entire business case then. A hard drive in 1987 cost a substantial fraction of the price of the computer, and the vast majority of home Atari STs and low-end PCs did not have one. Every serious layout program assumed a hard disk, because layout means keeping a document and a whole font set in play at the same time. GST built theirs to work off floppies on a machine with as little as a megabyte of memory. It was miserable, and it meant swapping disks, but it was possible, and possible is the difference between a market of thousands and a market of hundreds of thousands.

The versions kept coming and kept getting better rather than just bigger. Publisher 2 in 1991 added real WYSIWYG display and put manual kerning control in the hands of people who had never heard the word. Publisher 2.1, running on GEM/5, supported Bézier curves at a moment when that was not a given. On the PC the program shipped with Digital Research's GEM as a bundled runtime, so buyers got a graphical environment whether or not they had asked for one, and later versions moved to Windows.

~ the brands it wore ~

Almost nobody bought a box with GST's name on it. In the United States it was published by Timeworks, Inc. of Chicago, a company founded in 1982 by Mark Goldberg to make software for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and which had grown into an entry-level productivity house, and there it was called Publish-It!. Acorn commissioned a port for the Archimedes and shipped it in April 1989 as Acorn Desktop Publisher, where it brought Acorn's outline font manager and fourteen scalable fonts to the platform. Softkey sold a version as KeyPublisher. There was a business edition called DESKpress and a multilingual CD release called Press International.

Then it went further. The same program was sold as NEBS PageMagic, a name changed after objections from Adobe, and as Macmillan Publisher, and as Canon Publisher, and under a long tail of other brands that you can identify only by the.DTP file extension they all wrote. One codebase, a dozen labels, and buyers in different countries convinced they owned different products.

Microsoft Publisher arrived in 1993 and ended the affordable-DTP category as a business by making it a line item in a much larger bundle. Timeworks, Inc. had already been bought in 1993 by a company called Megalode Resources of Burlington, Ontario, which ran it for a year before it stopped. The last release carrying the name was Publish-It! 4 for Windows 3.1 in 1994. GST itself outlived its American partner by nearly two decades. It merged with eGames Europe in 2001 to become Greenstreet Software and was reconstituted as Greenstreet Online in July 2008, before being declared insolvent and going into voluntary liquidation in November 2012. The final descendant of Timeworks Publisher shipped in 2009 as Greenstreet Publisher 4, still able to open files written by the version that ran off floppy disks twenty-two years earlier.

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