PrintMaster

rebuilt

Unison World · 1985 · this disk a 1987 build · 360 KB single-sided Atari floppy

A 40-year-old greeting-card program, read straight off its disk image and put back together in a browser. Every font, border and piece of clip art below is decoded from the original files; the layout rules come from disassembling PM.TOS itself, not from guessing at screenshots.

The three pages

What came off the disk

Clip art
122 shapes · 88 × 52 · 578 B each
Borders
11 sets · corners and edges
Fonts
9 · real cell heights from FONTS1.FSZ
Printer drivers
17 .PRG child processes, ABI recovered
Dot pitch
120 dpi across, 72 down · aspect 3 : 5
PM.TOS
17,149 instructions · 28 OS calls, no GEM

Colophon

The disk is FAT12, so the files come out with an ordinary reader; the interesting part is that everything visual uses one record type — a byte of bytes-per-row, a byte of rows, a big-endian width, then 1bpp rows, MSB leftmost. Clip art, borders, menu illustrations and fonts are all that same container at different strides. Page geometry lives in a word table at 0x13a64 indexed by page type, artwork repeat counts at 0x14160, and lines advance by height × size + 4. The format notes are in FORMATS.md, the disassembly notes in REVERSING.md. Saving here uses your browser's own storage, so designs stay on this machine.

Provenance

PrintMaster was published in March 1985 by Unison World, Inc. of Berkeley, California; the floppy read for this project is a 1987 build, dated by its own sample documents. Unison World was bought by Kyocera, and the brand went on through MicroLogic, Mindscape, The Learning Company and Riverdeep — it is still sold today under the Broderbund name. Worth knowing before you admire the interface: in Broderbund Software, Inc. v. Unison World, Inc., 648 F. Supp. 1127 (N.D. Cal. 1986), a court held that PrintMaster's menu screens copied the structure and "total concept and feel" of Brøderbund's The Print Shop, whose copyright belonged to Pixellite Software. This is a preservation and study project; the disk image and the program binaries are not redistributed. Full note.