Newsmaster

Overview – This is another in the “…I can’t believe this disk’s alive…” series. I believe it was made by Unison, but I can’t be 100 percent sure. It is pretty cool, though. It’s essentially a newspaper page maker, with graphics and fonts. Fun stuff. I loved this program way back in the days, when I was printing with my dot matrix printer. I used this for school work (even though I had Word Perfect 5). It was fun to use. There’s no documentation with it, so you basically have to play with it to find out what everything does. Is it useful? Not if you compare it to a word processing program. But if you want something fast and easy that puts graphics and fancy fonts onto a page quickly and efficiently, then you’ll love it. This is a piece from a time when software was fun to use and didn’t require you to read a hugely thick manual.

Released by

Unison 1986

Language

English

System

PC

Description – Great little program. Sets you up with a layout, and from that point you just input your data. There’s no hand-holding in this one, but with experimentation you can easily get the jist of what’s going on – enough to be creating your own columns in less than an hour. It doesn’t get any better than this. There’s some memory problems with it though, that I was never able to resolve (but only when creating your own custom graphics). Compatible with any CGA, EGA, MDA or Hercules Monochrome Adapter video cards.

Type – Commercial. I have absolutely no idea of who actually created this program. It was installed on my 286 when bought back in the late 80’s. I’m sure it’s still copyrighted, but an exaustive search for anything related ended me up with nothing.

Compatibility – The requirements are fairly ancient – 8088 based computer with 580k free conventional memory. Easily supported without problems in a DOS window in Win9x. Should be able to run properly emulated by the more advanced OS’s as well. If anyone can get a modern printer working with this program, email me on how you did it.