Remember scanning?

[Andy_warp]

A typical interaction with a client USED to be

Customer: Did you get my files? Everything good?

Me: Yeah, it all came through. (We both had the newest tools and would geek out about how much easier they've made it)

Customer: Okay, well if any weird postscript comes up, let me know.

Me: Cool. Thanks.

Now

Customer: DID YOU GIT MY PDF?

Me: Yes but I emailed a day or two ago, the links are missing.

Customer: WELL THATS WHAT THEY SENT

Me: Okay, well your project is on hold until we can get those image links.

Customer: WE HAVE A GUY THAT CAN PUT SOMETHING TOGETHER CUSTOMER IS OVERSEAS

*.ai file arrives without links and live text

Me: Could you send link "A" "B" and "untitled"?

*first bad pdf emailed

Customer: Does this work?

*I bang my head against my desk until unconscious.

 

[Johnny Best]

Aldus Pagemaker, had a MacPlus with a separate 20 mg drive. Also a laser printer! Whole new world in printing. Somewhere in the 80s.

 

[burgmurk]

i used to scan and clean up medium format film a fair bit in the 90s. I miss the days where you'd tell Quark express to generate a pdf then take an hour for lunch while your computer was busy. I really dug how the powerpc macs would let you buffer keystrokes too, my party trick was laying out business cards on an sra3 with a couple of seconds worth of typing, then waiting minutes for the thing to catch up.

 

[Andy_warp]

I had one of the jellybean g3's...maybe os8.6 or 9.2 for awhile.

It was slow as hell, but it WOULD finish whatever command I attempted.
My comparable Dell for the time would crash like nobody's business!

Had a cool G3 Splash rip for my xerox color laser...it wouldn't print in sets...so hand collating!

 

[Bigdawg]

I ran a service bureau - for those that don't know what that is, we would print out RC paper for designers that had them new-fangled computers so that they could send them to whatever newspaper or magazine that needed it. Most of them didn't have any way to handle a digital file in those days. Our sister company was a typesetting shop. Then we started doing digital film and four-color separations for the printers to strip in. We acquired the first desktop drum scanner in the state of Florida... while I loved that thing, I don't miss having to scan slides or negatives. At all.
Did anyone else have a dedicated FTP computer that your clients would upload files to before the internet had FTP sites? I started online before there was a way to have pictures - the big thing back then was blinking type to get your attention. Everyone was on dial-up back, so if they used any pictures at all in the file it was an all-night adventure to transfer the files. I remember how happy I was when Zip drives came out so they could bring in the files instead of hoping nothing got corrupted in the hours long transfer. I started in Aldus Pagemaker, Illustrator 88 and Photoshop 2.

 

[Johnny Best]

Zip Drives, just had to get somebody's file I had on one of those. Still have about #50, I should transfer over to my external drives someday. I thought that was high tech when zip drives came out.
Had to get positives made for making my screen prints from a service bureau like you worked years ago. Have a friend who still has all that equipment and still does that work. Now it is just an email attachment to send. Use them to make directory slide ins on the illuminated directories.