Comment by larrys
11 years ago
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.