Similar - I was an early adopter of "desktop publishing". I was in the printing business and part of doing printing was doing typesetting. For that we had dedicated machines with terminals and large floppy drives which output on photographic paper which needed to be processed chemically. The first machine I bought (Itek) used light shining through a plastic font. Each font cost $40 (iirc) and for each variation (say, bold, once again iirc) you needed a different plastic piece.

Anyway in along with the first mac a bit later came the laserwriter and customers started using that for camera ready copy (canarie in the coal mine was only 300dpi way below photographic quality). Later linotype built a rip that could interface a Mac 512k (iirc) with the linotype (about 1985). I spent almost 6 figures on a linotype and became a service bureau. The minute I saw that you could draw a box on a Mac around type (with traditional systems you needed to essentially program this) I knew what would happen. That said I was in my 20's most others in my business didn't see it the same way since they were older.

Parent commenter - what was the age of your father at the time he had this revelation?