Comment by bane
11 years ago
I think this is a good example of what lots of people call the "MBA business model". It's a bit unfair to the MBA, but the idea is this:
1. End up in control of a thriving business. Doesn't matter how, flashy credentials and a nice suit, mixed with lots of buzz words and business speak usually work.
2. Fire everybody responsible for driving the product forward, frame this as "increasing profitability" or "cutting costs" or similar.
3. Increase sales staff and squeeze as much blood from this stone as possible.
4. When the market for your product inevitably shrinks because you've made your product irrelevant or because of competition or other reasons, blame shifting market winds for making your product irrelevant.
5. Sell the product or company off to somebody else, collect cash out your stock, rinse and repeat...or spend some time on your yacht.
An anecdote also related to the article. I grew up in family business...not very successful family business, but nevertheless. One of the businesses my family ran for a number of years was a small (very small) print house. Most months it didn't generate enough to pay my parent's paycheck, but they stuck with it till retirement.
One of the interesting things I had a chance to see was the invention and growth of the electronic desktop publishing industry. At the start layout was a very long process of getting blocks of text in a chosen font and size printed on small dedicated machines not too far removed from what Gutenberg would recognize. Then a specialist would, on a light table, manually cut the text to size, and glue the pieces of the layout to a master sheet. When all the artwork was finally in place, they'd go and produce a photographic negative of the final page, and then using something like lithography burn the image to a metal sheet which was then used on a press to produce the final page. As you can guess this took forever, but one of the most laborious parts was getting the original little blocks of text made up.
Enter the computer age and a small business like my parents could drop $20k for a pre-press dedicated layout system. I don't remember too many details of it, but it looked basically like your typical early 80s green screen computer. Everything was typed up by a specialist in some kind of meta-LaTeX-like language. There was a secondary very high res and large for the time black and white graphics preview monitor you could render the page on to get a look and proof (if you had enough memory). Then you could "print" the result to a photoprinter that worked quite a bit like a mini-darkroom. You had to keep various reservoirs stocked with the appropriate photographic chemicals, but the output was state of the art of the time. The rest of the process was virtually identical to the above -- even then it cut turnaround time on a job in-half. I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never seen anything else like it. On occasion, when it broke down, a specialist would be called in to come repair it.
Over time, and as small printing business printing got more complex and this system aged, they replaced it a couple of times until eventually they hired a guy who also had his own smaller printing business on the side. They bought him out and he brought in-house a very early full-pre press desktop publishing system with him. Which was Windows 2.0 and a very old version of Aldus PageMaker, I think it was 3.something and a very expensive laser printer. They pretty much stuck with this setup until they sold the company many years later. Basically what this bought was that it essentially removed all the manual gluing and carefully measured layout such that, once a page was setup, you printed it off, took it to the dark room, made your negative and then the plate and the printing was off. It saved days of work.
Again, as the business grew more complex, the demand for color and complex layouts increased they started to need to do full color proofs. In printing, one of the principle problems is that, once a design gets through all of the darkroom, lithograph, ink color matching, screens etc. it rarely looks much like the original design. This magnifies when you start working with 2 colors, then gets exponentially more complicated up to 4 (CMYK). So the need for rapid proofs of what the design would probably look like became more and more important -- even then the proof only had a passing resemblance to the final product. Unfortunately, the equipment that could produce these proofs was prohibitively expensive. So my parent's graphics guy would outsource his designs to a graphics bureau to make a proof. I think a few pages might take a day or two to turn around and cost a couple hundred dollars.
I used to deliver the disks over to the bureau and remember the first time I walked in. A gleaming open room, packed full of Macintoshes running QuarkXPress and PageMaker, and some very expensive printer looking devices all along a back wall. I'd give them the disk and the job order and inevitably get a groan when I pointed out that it was a PC formatted disk (this was back in the days that this mattered). "Oh, it's you guys, when are you ever going to get a Mac and get Quark? It'll make this much easier." They'd wheel out, on a movable desk, an old PC, blow the dust off and fire it up and make sure the disk was readable. "Okay, we'll sigh call you when it's done."
Various incompatibilities with some of their proof making equipment and their PC caused lots of time and cost overruns, but it had to be done. I'm pretty sure, in the local market they worked in, they may have been the only PC graphics shop around. It sucked interfacing with the rest of the market, but at the same time, everybody who brought in their own artwork did that work on a PC, not a Mac. All the churches and parents getting wedding invitations, all the small businesses getting tri-fold fliers, all of them. And they got lots of business because other companies refused to deal with their homespun PC formatted artwork.
I don't have a point, just thought I'd add a little first hand history.
I worked at the Auto Trader in the late 80's/ early 90's. First as an assembly worker, then as an ad layout artist.
We had the typesetting printers and a small team of dedicated typists who entered the hand-written car descriptions into the standard ad size box (paid by the word!) and then matched the black and white photos of the car to the ad copy.
When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. Using a very light coloured wax offered the same adhesion as glue but allowed you to move the photos and type around, and was invisible to the stat camera.
The wax machine was half the fun - two rollers, one rolling through hot wax, would grab the paper or photo from the back, roll hot wax onto the bottom surface, and deposit it on the other side ready for placement.
The second most fun tool was the stat camera, which allowed you to resize photo or type by physically moving the photo or type from the camera lens, or allow you to put a halftone filter over a black and white photo to allow for single colour printing.
What used to require a team of 40 people - ad layout designers, line workers, typesetters - to handle six weekly magazine could probably be done by one person now.
> When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX.
We used to use a rubbery glue called Cow Gum. It too was repositionable and invisible to the camera. I haven't seen it for years, gone the way of Letraset probably, but it was good stuff. The raging solvent-fume headaches after a day of pasting up were not so good though.
Wax was great because it was non-toxic, quick drying and smelled good.
You just had to make sure not to wax things twice because it gunked up the machine!
You've jogged my memory and are correct. I remember a hot wax roller that sat in a reservoir of some kind, and little wax sticks about the size or 3 sticks of chewing gum or so.
I think there was also several kinds of adhesive tapes used for some of the work with different patterns on them as well.
> I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never seen anything else like it
Sounds like a phototypesetter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting
(I'm probably going to get some terminology wrong here, but...) My mum worked at a regional daily newspaper. They had 2 or 3 phototypesetters in the corner of their computer room. Each one was about the size of 3 full height racks. They'd print on to photographic paper and were designed to be automatically fed in to a machine (about 1.5 full height racks high) from the same manufacturer that would develop the paper, ready for a Compositor (ie, a surly unionized employee) to cover it with hot wax, slice it with a scalpel and physically lay it out on the page. If the printer crashed, it would have to be rebooted with a series of switches to bootstrap it far enough that it could load it's bootloader (?) from paper tape.
Where she worked decided to use a different manufacturer for the printer and the developer such that it wouldn't automatically feed from one to the other. So the printer dumped it's outputs in to boxes mounted on the wall of a darkroom and would wait for someone to go in and manually feed it in to the developer.
It was glorious.
If anyone ever gets the chance to go on an open-day or tour of the noisy end of a newspaper or large print shop, i'd totally recommend it.
"Sounds like a phototypesetter:"
You are correct. I owned one type - Itek Quadritek (another was Compugraphic). The fonts were essentially plastic disks. At the time (early 80's) each font was $40 (80's) dollars.
I later (about '86 iirc) replaced this with a Linotronic which was driven by not only a green screen front end (as described) but later the first Mac 128k (I think Pmaker 1.0 required 512k mac). The lino was $80,000 in 80's dollars approx iirc.
"Sounds like a phototypesetter:"
Wanted to add that to this day I can still remember the sound of the stepper motors spinning and manipulating the plastic font disks. A really cool sound. (Similar in a way to modem negotiation but lasting much longer obviously).
On those machines for anyone not familiar you actually had to write code (mark point, return point) in order to draw a simple box. Then more code for the actual type. Everything was placed by coordinates.
So when (even) mac paint was released and you could draw a box and put type inside of it the potential seemed quite obviously. It also added greatly to creativity because a designer could work in real time coming up with a design.
Even more fun was the Compugraphic Junior. It didn't use disks, but film strips with the font. Then your had to switch out some gears to change the font size.
Seemed pretty futuristic at the time though.
Some of this sounds familiar. The Berthold unit in your link looks like the same general family of technology...everything is recognizable (the Linotype photo doesn't look familiar in style at all). But from what I remember their setup was maybe a couple steps more modern. Nothing so big to be rack sized.
The green screen bit was your typical 1980s CRT green on black terminal with two 5 1/4" floppy drives vertically mounted next to the screen. The connected rendering monitor was a vertical format...the screen was maybe 17"? And the photoprinter was maybe the size of a large color laser printer today. I think all the reservoirs were semi-internally mounted and I think the width of the printout wasn't even 8 1/2". It was really suited just for blocks of text to be later hand pasted up.
There was no place for the printouts to go, so for a while they just dumped on the floor until somebody nailed an extra empty paper shipping box underneath to catch them.
I don't remember there being any other pieces of hardware, but again, I'm going back through the haze of a few decades here and I didn't personally work on the equipment.
after a little looking
The closest I can find is this http://macpro.freeshell.org/quadritek/Digitek.html
I know that they went through at least 2 or 3 generations of these before switching to digital desktop publishing, I think my memories are mostly of their last system. So the previous ones could have been more like the other ones being described here.
Your comments brought back a lot of memories for me.
I worked as a production artist (someone who takes a designer's idea and turns it into somethng that can actually be produced, hence the name) off and on for 15 years, starting in the early 1970s and ending about 1991. I worked for an ad agency, typesetter, publisher, and finally in the art department of a flexo plate maker. When I first started, we used drafting boards, T-squares, X-acto knives, and rubber cement. Type was of the hot variety - photo type was only for display type, not body copy. In the late 80s I was trained on two SOTA production machines: a DuPont VASTER system (used both vector and raster graphics), and later a Context system that ran on Sun workstations.
The typesetter your parents bought was likely either a Compugraphic or A/M (Adressograph Multigraph) - in the pre-DTP days, they seemed to have most of the market for phototypsetting systems (at least for smaller businesses). I worked with both, and your description would fit either of them.
I guess I would somewhat dispute your assertion that layouts (or paste-ups/mechanicals as they're more properly called) took "forever" or that it was a "very long" process. Using the "Thin and Pretty" layout in the article as an example, the last place I worked we probably would have budgeted an hour for the job - typesetting, mechanical, camera work, and (maybe) printing plates (all done in-house). I don't think that's terribly out of line with the time it would take using DTP. (That doesn't include design time!)
When we were first making the switch from the old manual operation to digital, we often found it took longer to do the work using DTP; it wasn't unusual to hear an artist say "Screw it" and go back to his light table to finish a job. But that was to be expected - unfortunately, a number of my co-workers had little or no computer experience. Over time that ended, although the company did keep two full-time artists on staff who did nearly everything the "old" way until about 2000. The huge advantage of DTP, especially early on, was that changes/additions/corrections were so much easier. And in our case, it was considerably easier to actually find artwork on the computer. All our paste-ups were done on #20 illustration board (for dimensional stability) and they were filed in row after row after row of architectural file cabinets. Unfortunately, no one had ever devised a good filing system, so it would often take 2 or 3 or 4 times as long to find the freakin' art you needed to make a change on as it took to actually make the change...
Thanks for providing some clarification and color to my very hazy brain dump.
I do remember my parent's "climate controlled" filing room and filing system for client artwork and other sundry. It was basically a big storage room filled with racks of old paper shipping boxes and large grey envelopes. The customer order would get written up on triplicate carbon free paper (customer, contact info, type of job, ink, references to artwork, due date etc), one color for the front office, one for the "lookup" catalog (organized by customer name) and one would go on the front of the envelope. All the artwork, disks, negatives, proofs, a few final samples and other assets for the job would go in the envelope and get organized onto a shelf.
Every job generated a new job number that was something like yearmonth-sequential# so a job coming in today might be 201403-38 and jobs folders were roughly organized by the 201403 part.
If a customer came in and said "I want another 10,000 of that job I had you print lat Oct" we'd go to the catalog, lookup their name, find the 201310-# job and go pull it from the shelf to review. It usually took just a few minutes to find something. I think every 7 or 8 years we'd go through and purge old files just because there simply wasn't the physical space.
They'd also use the job # part of the serial, when writing up jobs, to keep a rough estimate on business volume. Since every month the job # started back over at 1, and you knew that you'd on average do 600 jobs a month, you could get a feel if the month was slow or fast just be seeing what the next job id was going to be on a given date.
The job id's were then used in scheduling. For a long time my father drew up the schedules by hand. He had a grid printed up on large format paper, and I remember him coming home every day with a stack of the front office carbon-free copies for the day and drawing up the production schedule on the grid.
I think the hours of the work day were along the top of the grid and the equipment operator was along the side. He used some kind of color coding system (with the full job # and a legend) to trace the job through the work-day as it moved through various pieces of equipment and such, and he'd use some known metrics for how long it'd take to do that kind of job on this or that equipment, and budget it out. There was quite an art to it. Especially for big jobs that spanned multiple days that needed to be kept track of.
It was kind of a Gantt chart, but a little different. And it provided a clear visualization of all the production going on at a glance. He'd make a couple copies and one would go in the production room so any operator could go check it for their next job, or to see if they were on schedule (sometimes they didn't agree and they'd go make their case for a schedule adjustment).
Sometime in the late 90s he finally got a computer and reproduced the entire thing in Excel, which meant he could do all the scheduling at work instead of at home. When they finally sold their company, the new owners were impressed enough with the system that I think they adopted it for their business.
This is all too true. The interesting thing is when companies get into this sort of death spiral you can usually spot it if you look carefully. If you're a competitor with an "800 lb gorilla" which has just entered this territory you have a good shot at killing them if you execute well.
I speculate the reason this sort of technique persists though is that the only people who get hurt here are the lower level employees and the customers. Smart investors make money on the short selling, the top management makes money/reputation on the original upside.
I've always been interested in the particular song and dance that's performed during the board meetings to convince them the CEO's blood squeezing strategy is not what's causing the company to noticeably fail.
All of your history is essentially correct. I owned a company in this business in the early 80's (started it right out of college btw.) We bought the first linotronic ($80k, driven by a Mac running Pagemaker 1.0) in our city so essentially we had the first service bureau you might say. Taking and printing disks (even from a Mac) was a complete mess and generally super aggravating. Side fact: This was all before fax machines were in widespread use for proofing. That in itself was a major leap in getting customer approval.
Thanks for adding any color or detail you can remember. It's very hazy in my memory, I was pretty young and didn't ever work too much in the artwork department. I mostly just made money in the summers doing odd jobs and running errands.
One thing I do remember was the endless difficulty in receiving artwork from customers who produced everything in RGB instead of CMYK and IIR converting it for color separation was a huge PIA.
I also do remember when FAX machines started to get used more. I'd say a good 30-50% of my parent's business relied on Fax. I think they kept a couple of spare machines in a cabinet in case it failed it was so critical. The first few machines printed on thermal paper, and once spamming fax machines caught on, simply became too expensive. They'd come back after a weekend and have an entire spool of paper all over the floor full of advertisements and other junk.
I think once the web and e-mail started to catch on, and inkjet printers became cheap enough, they definitely felt it and business dropped tremendously. There's still no cheaper substitute for printing off a few thousand copies of something that's available for home users. But lots of people just get by with e-mail or some alternative to physical copies.
Also the state of expectations started to catch up to them. You really couldn't own a 1 or 2 color offset print shop anymore. You need to handle 4 color, and do it without a huge cost premium, because everybody wanted full-color brochures and wedding invitations and whatever. Having lots of sunk cost in previous technologies and staff made the cost of switching simply too difficult.
It was a lot of fun though.
I used to deal with this issue of PC PageMaker disks in a Mac & Quark world at a service bureau back in the day. The problem was that PageMaker had unpredictable results when printing to an imagesetter.
I would open the file in Mac PageMaker, delete all the graphics, save the pages as EPS, then rebuild in Quark. Quark had this great Xtension that let you place the output with great precision on the imagesetter film roll.
> I don't have a point, just thought I'd add a little first hand history.
Your anecdote is much better than the article I submitted.
Having gone through all this I definitely appreciated both the article posted as well as the parent comment.
I will add my own anecdote about Quark from that time period. They had a total cocky shitty attitude. This was back at the time when by comparison Apple (iirc) seemed downright friendly to customers. Also users of Quark definitely looked down upon anyone using Pagemaker. Quark (as the posted article mentioned) had a firm lock on the market and was seen as the choice of true artists. (Once again, from my memory).
Not at all! The article dug up some old memories I thought folks might be interested in reading a brain dump of.
actually, i felt the submitted article was the best thing i've read on HN all week. thanks for posting it.
I remember seeing PageMaker around that vintage. It came with a runtime-only version of Windows since everyone was still using DOS.
This provided a lot of insight into an area that I knew absolutely nothing about. Thanks for taking the time to type it all out.
Thanks for taking the time to write that up, very interesting and well-written.