This weekend, OSD will celebrate our 32nd birthday. We opened our doors for business as a design studio on July 5, 1983. In that year, we installed a single telephone and line to our first office location here in Indianapolis. Four people used that single telephone line for over a year. We had no Wi-Fi, FTP site, or worldwide web. Heck, we didn’t even own a fax machine. No single advertising agency or design studio in the greater Indianapolis area, to our knowledge, used desktop computer systems for graphics or even for communications. This was not the pre-electric era, but it sure feels like it now. While we didn’t have technology, we had a lot of creativity and ambition. Here’s how we got it done.
Cross-town collaboration via courier services
To deliver or receive our work, we did what everyone else did then. We hand delivered it! Locally we used courier services, taxis, and even Greyhound buses. Most of our advertising related vendors had their own in-house delivery services. Whether it was a typesetting company, a color separation house, or a printing company – they all had delivery guys. Yes, guys. In those days they seemed to all be men; I don’t remember any female couriers. Most type houses ran deliveries 24 hours a day and had 3 shifts working around the clock. If you don’t know what a typesetter or color separator are, look them up. These crafts are all but dead now.
Long-distance calls and a FedEx predecessor
OSD had a few big national clients on the east cost and others that were out of state. To deliver an overnight package such as a handcrafted color layout and printed body copy, it took tons of planning and a little praying. Before FedEx or UPS started their next day services, we used airlines, taxis, and courier services. This was very expensive, by the way. By the mid 80s this all changed. If print materials were needed overseas we would sometimes use Flying Tigers, which later merged with FedEx. High tariffs were also involved with most countries. There were a lot of long distance calls that were made and heavy planning was involved to make a next-day delivery happen. This is not to mention the high costs of getting your goods where they needed to be.
Going digital – finally!
Things started changing rapidly in the mid-80s. One early behemoth digital system OSD used was the one million dollar Scitex machine. This system was a tape-driven digital photo-retouching monster. As I recall it cost around $500 per hour to operate. That was a great deal of money back in ’83. It was basically like a giant Photoshop program with hardware that took up tons of space and had its own specialized operator.
We also occasionally used the Telex station-to-station networking system. Which enabled us to send a black and white page to New York in a few hours. Although, to get that single page to the local Telex terminal, it meant either sending an employee, taxi, or a delivery driver downtown first. This was a 15 to 20 minute drive to the terminal hub from our office. It seemed that a one page B&W Telex transfer cost around $35 to $50 per page. It also wouldn’t end up on your client’s desk until you made delivery arrangements in the city you were sending it to, which entailed more costs.
So the next time you upload a digital file to another country with one click of a mouse, just think about how difficult (and costly!) it was to do the same thing 32 years ago.
- Ling
