In the beginning....

I'm taking a day to clean my office.  I finally let go of the drawer full of floppy disks.  It reminded me of how much I have loved my career and how far we have come in media design.  I started out learning about page layout, halftone screening and color separations when it was cut and paste and we had to go to a service bureau.   My father was the first yearbook designer to do a complete book digitally in our community.  Back then desktop publishing was so brand new that the printers and designers were learning all together and there were constant struggles with getting peripherals to talk to each other.  The internet didn't exist then but we had bbs bulletin boards and fax machines.  I use to work with an art director that would fax me specs and I would set up the photo shoot, make a polaroid, scan it and put it in as an FPO and then upload that to a bbs and wait for a phone call to move forward.  Today we skype and don't think twice about the miracle of communication technology. Just yesterday I was having a skype meeting with an organization in Ghana Africa and one of my other clients is in Kenya!

For those of you just coming into the business you missed out on the era of when we used to work on our own machines and it was the wild west frontier for typography and graphics when a 24bit dot matrix printer pumping out a GIF file was cutting edge.  Networking was so unreliable even the software for connecting computers together was called Timbuktu!  I remember the day we converted our 44 and 88mb syquest drives into doorstops.

I suppose there are new frontiers to conquer.  I know I'm excited about ePublications and the convergence of still photography and video and how type can now dance across the page if I want it to.  There are new frontiers to be discovered with touch screen technology.  But for just a few moments this morning I will remember with fondness the thrill of getting words and images together on a computer screen that is WYSIWIG.  Life was beautifully contained within an Encapsulated Post Script file that would actually download to an imagesetter without errors.

I still remember the day I walked by the first generation Apple store downtown and saw the Apple Lisa in all of its monochrome beauty through the glass window and I had to go inside.  I remember designing databases and games in PASCAL on a friends Apple IIC with a green monitor and the joy I had when I put a 32k upgrade card into my Mac Color Classic and how proud I was to spend 4K on a brand new Mac IIci for my father so he could get that yearbook out the door and still get at least four hours of sleep because of the speed increase.

I wonder if anybody remembers the wonder of watching the Space Shuttle missions and knowing they were controlling all of that machinery with an Apple III.  An iPhone has more power than that.

Forgive my nostalgia.  I take comfort in knowing that the latest OSX operating system I installed this week is still based on 1960's technology and that an Amiga had parallel processing and video editing features long before Adobe released the creative cloud.