Back In the days of flying toasters and talking moose I remember hearing about a new piece of software. Aldus Pagemaker. Tucked away in the Marketing department this was said to be revolutionary. If only we could find someone who knew how to use it!
Desktop Publishing, which gave us he acronym DTP evolved fast. It was probably the decades of Data Processing (DeePee) which forced the T into DTP but times were changing. Before we knew it, image processing, not data processing would be all the rage.
Suddenly DP departments became IT. DP Managers became IT Directors and along the way one group of nerdy geeks replaced another. Over in Marketing, the Graphic Designer had a new tool: the Macintosh.
The word Adobe took on a new meaning as did the work Quark, the latter having the advantage of being little used in polite society! Another acronym, ATM (Adobe Type Manager) is still missed today although it lives on in my memory whenever I get cash from a bank machine. I secretly hope the bank notes I received will all be printed in Helvetica – those bank machines are really printers, did you know?
Over in the Accounting Department we now called ourselves: Finance. If those IT guys could do, you better believe the beancounters could match it! My first experience involved a Mac SE with no hard drive. The system and Excel were on one disk, my files on another. I had six of these floppy disks and they lasted me almost a year – i.e. 4.8MB! That’s MB not GB!
For me it wasn’t Pagemaker, but Excel and the wonderfully named Cricket Graph for charts. I did acquire After Dark, of flying toaster fame – I always though that would make a great Apple Product name. Years later the Macintosh became the Mac and Apple Computer turned into just a fruit.
Back in the days of flying toasters and talking moose, I first saw Pagemaker on a PC, Excel on a Mac. Funny how that’s worked out since!
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