What was the first software used for graphic design?

was something you never heard of. Crosfield Electronics of Hemel Hempstead, England, released a program called Electronic Page Composition Systems in the very early 1980s. If you had a Crosfield Magnascan drum scanner, you got it as part of the package--you had an Analyze module, which was a small, low resolution scanner with a halogen bulb as its light source; an Expose module, which was an extremely high resolution scanner that uses twelve lasers as its light source; a Sun workstation to run the scanner; another Sun for the EPCS package; several drums and a mounting station to have something to mount the work to when you scan it; and a plotter to write the scans to film. (You also got a guy from Crosfield Electronics who installed the system for you. He came in a box. You had to promise to feed him and mail him back after you were done with him.) EPCS does one thing and does it well: allows the user to put scans on a piece of film in precise locations. (Quick note on the analyze and expose modules--which was something they had on both the Hell Chromagraph S3800 and all the Magnascans. These big scanners--they're about the size of your car and cost more than your home--need to make salable scans all the time they're on, so they give you a second scanner. You mounted the scanning drum on the analyze module--Hell called it something else, but it did the same thing--told the machine how to scan each picture, and saved all the commands in a script file. Then you mounted the drum on the expose module and pushed a button to make the machine scan every picture on the drum. You could then put another drum on the analyze module and prepare another script.) Right now you're scratching your head thinking, "what good is that?" If you're thinking that, you never stripped scanner film. Let's pretend you have a Dainippon Screen SG-808 scanner and I have a Magnascan. We've both got Realtors as customers. Realtoes love to put pictures of twenty homes on each page in the book. When you scan the homes on your 808, you will receive four little pieces of film for each home--one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. You've got to cut out every sep and strip them all individually. A really great stripper could lay down five of these pages a day, if he was working his ass off. It's expensive to do it this way because strippers cost money, and you're real limited as to the number of jobs you can get through the shop unless you've got a stripping room that used to be a Basketball court. OTOH, my EPCS guy can crank out five sets of page negs an hour, and they look better than handstripped ones. When it came out, the union hated it--because it automatically stripped images together it would take away work for strippers. Turns out it actually increased opportunities for strippers--it made printing color cheaper so more people could afford to do it, and you had to hire more strippers to keep up with demand.