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If you're wondering "who was Studio Software Corporation", you're like the vast majority of people alive today. SSC was active only from 1982-1987, and in that time released some very early desktop publishing software whose primary achievement was being forgotten by everybody. This information has survived only by dumb luck of me finding an estate sale listing on eBay that turned out to be the personal archive of one of the principal developers. Despite the floppies' best efforts to stop me I managed to archive the enormous majority of the data, including several complete releases, and internal builds and even source code.

Why dedicate the effort to preserving something like this? For one, it's weird enough to be notable. Studio Software defined themselves by chosing the losing technology at every turn, resulting in a program that in in 1985 launched using GKS under DOS via GSX (having only just then abandoned CP/M-86), and by 1987 had evolved to use GSS-CGI. If you know what all those things are by name, my hat is off to you; if not, just know that they were various graphical interface technologies that never went anywhere on the PC. FrontPage is one of a very, very small set of commercial software ever released that used GSS-CGI; I only know of three others. Second, I'm pretty sure this is the only copy of this software in existence, at least on the internet. I can find next to no evidence that this software existed, save a single entry in the Computer History Museum (which as of this writing has not been digitized) and a handful of references in news articles. As such I have found myself in the role of the custodian of this company's history, and I want to make sure that it's preserved despite its relative irrelevance.

The actual content has been archived at Archive.org. All the commercial releases have been uploaded, as well as a "FrontPage 1.21" that I made from the official source code which cleans up the installer a good amount to make installing the software easier. The source code is separately available, but I redacted the names of the original developers as they surely did not expect these files to ever be made public. There's also a "Content" disk image that contains a variety of sample text files.

I'm not going to say this software is good. It's... not. It may well have been competitive at the time, but using it today feels like a portal to a parallel universe that didn't go the way ours did. Sadly even I don't have a complete archive; I'm missing things like fonts for the typesetters. But if you somehow have an actual vintage typesetter that this has a driver for and you want to try to use it with DO-IT, then by all means, contact me and maybe we can figure something out. I feel confident this will never happen.

The software covered three eras: Speed/Art, their first entry, a very primitive page layout program written in BASIC of which I have only a working demo version and a variety of varyingly broken development copies; DO-IT, their main product, a proper desktop publisher written in Pascal; and FrontPage, a re-branding of DO-IT to try to recover their rapidly failing market position (it didn't). Source is available for Speed/Art (sadly not the demo) and FrontPage.

I have a timeline (with citations where possible) and the story I wrote up when I announced this find, with some revisions based on things I learned since. I also wrote a very basic guide to use, and there's one that came from SSC themselves along with some marketing copy that I think is interesting.

The banner above is a reconstruction from a very badly mangled scan from a legal filing I managed to dig up, which I think looks pretty good all things considered, though I couldn't find a 100% match on the font. There was a similar DO-IT logo, but FrontPage switched to just the word "FRONTPAGE" with the "A" stylized as a person waving a newspaper. See the gallery for examples.