As the World Turns Over

by David M. Cole

When the cliché-o-matic is in full swing, it turns out beauts like this:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same."

With thoughts of the Las Vegas heat beginning to cause my brow to sweat already, it's obvious that NEXPO is right around the corner.

Ah, NEXPO. Five days of standing all the time. Walking the aisles. Prowling the booths.

This will be my 15th NEXPO in 16 years (I stayed home one year, sick as a schnauzer). Some of them begin to blend together (Were we in Atlanta in '85 or '86?), and others are seared into memory (a late night in '89 in Rivergate Hall in New Orleans, helping Leaf Systems Founder Bob Caspe debug code so his Leaf Picture Desk would demo the next morning).

As I reflect back on all those shows, I begin to realize that they have provided a forum for some truly important events. Unfortunately, many of those events transpired over a glass of wine and a nibble or two and weren't documented anywhere (and are now lost in the glaze of old age).

But by reaching into my archives, I've taken a hard look at the last five shows and here are my rekindled memories of each of them:

1991: The big story of ANPA/TEC (as it was then called) in Las Vegas was Atex's alliance with CText. Bedford, Mass.-based Atex had made an alliance with IBM the year before, but that didn't provide it with access to a new-generation front end, and CText had such an animal. Atex also unbundled its Page Production Node package, which produced the EdPage product. Also at the show, DuPont demonstrated its Whirlwind front end (that showed a lot of debt to CSI), P.Ink was shown for the first time in English, and a slew of companies had started supporting QuarkXPress for page layout.
1992: At the tail end of a recession, there wasn't much new at the last ANPA/TEC, which was held in Atlanta. A small startup in Pennsylvania, Managing Editor Software Inc., had a pretty nifty ad-dummying system that ran on a Macintosh. Mycro-Tek Inc. of Wichita was showing a new Mac-based front-end system called Freedom. And longtime industry supplier Dewar Information Systems Corp. was showing a program that "glued" QuarkXPress (for the PC!) to Microsoft Word and offered front-end features like directories. C.E. Steuart Dewar gave most of the demos of "DewarView" from his laptop. "We expect to achieve a dominant position," Dewar told reporters.
1993: The first NEXPO was held in New Orleans, and users said that even though the suppliers weren't moving to open systems fast enough, at least they seemed to be listening. DewarView was the buzz of the show and Open Pre-press Interface (OPI) software started to become a commodity (the only problem: no two OPI implementations were the same). Suppliers scrambled to show they were no longer supporting proprietary systems, with an executive from Cybergraphic Systems saying, "Feature-rich systems are gone." Harris Publishing Systems unveiled its NewsMaker editorial front end that ran under Windows. Quark Inc. showed version 1.01 of Quark Publishing System, which tied 'XPress to a text editor that could show accurate story lengths.
1994: Rumors were the currency of NEXPO in Las Vegas. Companies were going to shut down or be sold off, or sell off their assets. Within 48 hours of the show's close, the one about DuPont Newspaper Systems came true and the company (which had resulted from mergers among Composition Systems Inc., Hastech, Crosfield, Camex and ImagiTex) was closed. Within a month, Information International Inc. had announced it was buying Monotype Systems Inc. and H. Berthold Systems from International Publishing Associates Holding Ltd. A little more than three months later, the merger was called off.
1995: The pall of newsprint price increases hung over the Atlanta show like a thick, dark cloud. The suppliers all rushed to display Internet-related products--any kind of Internet-related products--and the latest trend was "outsourcing," with newspapers sending out their weather, stocks, comics or, in one case, their entire color pre-press department. Vendors showed a lot of innovation in the world of classified front-end systems. At the show, Autologic announced it was merging with Information International Inc. And within weeks after the show, Dewar Information Systems Corp. announced it had been purchased by Sysdeco, the Norwegian software firm that had earlier acquired Atex.

The industry has changed dramatically in five years, at least in the pre-press arena. We've gone from almost all-proprietary to no-proprietary. We've lost some suppliers and gained some others. Ideas that seemed off base in '91 are right on today. Prevalent theories of '92 are gone, replaced by a whole new set of theories.

Here's a scary fact: The first time I wrote the word "Internet," the year was 1993.

Now the cliché-o-matic is churning out stuff like:

"The only constant is change."

We'll see whether that's true again this year, June 15-19, under Las Vegas' piercing summer orb.

Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and is editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (415) 673-2424; fax, (415) 673-2449. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.