Creative Print, Promotion and Web Design Solutions
A look at the past and an insightful view of the future...
What it means to you:
The point of this little history lesson is that you can count on us to be at the forefront of technological changes in our business.
The last few thoughts in 'Pastels to Pixels' remain true to this day: ...All of this technological expansion may seem somewhat overwhelming, and it is to some degree; however, it also presents opportunities to develop markets by solving problems that could not have been handled efficiently and economically prior to the built-in flexibility and diversification of today’s advancing technology...
R.I.P.
Apple IIfx 40MHz, 32mb ram.
In 1991, a real bargain at $5,000.
We've come a long way.
Funny. We remember sending digital art files for Weight Watchers® 'Slim Shake' to a packaging printer in Cincinnati, OH at a whopping 4800 baud. It was the greatest thing in the world at the time - four of us standing and listening to this box screaming and screeching (hoping it would connect as we had promised the customer) and voilá - the files uploaded! Does anyone even remember 'baud'?
We also remember 'Syquest Drives'. These amazing portable disks could hold 44 megabytes! Of course that evolved into 'Zip Drives' that could hold 100 megabytes and today we all walk around with 64 Gigabytes on our keychains.
Apple Computer has also come a long way
In the early '90s we upgraded one of the stations to an Apple IIfx 40MHz - for around $5,000 if I remember correctly – which didn't include a monitor (19" high resolution monitor for two grand? I'll take it.). It also didn't include the software or any of the array of peripherals you needed at the time. Of course we also spent another $800 to get the 16mb ram upgrade (who wouldn't?) to max this machine out at an unbelievable 32mb of ram!
Sadly all of these early machines became victims of our own curiosity: 'Let's tear this box open and look at the guts of this thing'. Each of them was sent to a new home in a landfill long before we knew the dangers...
ARTICLE: FROM PASTELS TO PIXELS
A vision of the future of electronic graphics.Written by Robert Moreau in 1989.
In 1959, four color lithography was just gaining recognition; letterpress was dying; electromechanically produced typography (cold type) was in its infancy; handset foundry type and hot cast type were fading; photography had replaced the illustrator and the commercial artist was still rendering layouts and comps with pencils, paint and pastels. Coming on the scene were such wondrous time-saving devices as press-down and transfer type, cut-a-color sheets for backgrounds and finally...color markers... pointed and wide nibbed! What a revolution! Coloring layouts with pastels was out! “Gas sticks” were the latest wonder of the world!
As the evolution continued and matured, electromechanically generated type soon gave way to the computer generation. As in any new technology there were shortcomings and moments of frustration with these new and wonderful tools. Yet each new generation produced sharper images faster and with greater flexibility. While computer generated type was great unto itself, that obviously wasn’t the end...rather, only the beginning! If type could be set electronically, what about arranging elements on the page? Well, why not? And so the evolution continued.
Electronic miniaturization led to minicomputers and soon mini became micro. Hardware had become smaller and smaller, storage and handling larger and greater until today we have almost unlimited movement of images executed on equipment that fits on top of a desk… Electronic tools exist with which one can draw, paint, cut and paste, do page make up, add or delete elements, play with colors, retouch photo images, print fully assembled color comps and in some situations, even generate pre-press color separated film...and to put the icing on the cake one can send it all from one computer to another via phone lines! A long, long way, I’d say, from layouts done by hand, with pastels!
Think all of this is something? You bet! But tomorrow will be even greater... exciting new tools and software are coming on stream every day! Today’s graphic art and related service groups must be at the leading edge of the technological evolution or surely be left in the dust!
MichaelRobert entered the market place, abreast of today’s available technology with a keen awareness that it is essential to stay up with technology that is itself accelerating at enormous speed. All of this technological expansion may seem somewhat overwhelming, and it is to some degree; however, it also presents opportunities to develop markets by solving problems that could not have been handled efficiently and economically prior to the built-in flexibility and diversification of today’s advancing technology.
