Post by And Kevin 2024 on Sept 15, 2020 16:52:11 GMT
Some may have seen me mention the DTP revolution of decades ago, where PC applications removed the need for literal cut & paste and typesetters and many others within the newspaper and magazine printing trade.
One of the causes of it was this history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/Pagemaker.html which became the industry Standard, and it was very very expensive. The reason for that was simple. For a start it ran on the very expensive Apple PC only at first. (You think they are expensive today?!) Only businesses could really afford them. Normally, developers of anything hope to get their outlay back within one to two years. Pagemaker had a limited market at the time, so the price for it was very very high. Not that it mattered because those who could make use of it were not strapped for cash, and could claim the expense back anyway.
Eventually it was adapted to run on IBM compatible PCs. Much cheaper than Apple machines, and far more common. But the cost of Pagemaker did not reduce, because it was still aimed at pros, who could afford it, because they used it to make money. But it also started to get competition from QuarkXPress, which also became an industry Standard, and expensive too!
If you did not have training in either of those you were very fortunate to get a job in the newspaper and magazine creating business, even as a reporter.
Eventually PageMaker lost out, and Adobe bought the rights and it eventually evolved in to Adobe InDesign. And still very expensive, regardless of it now having a potentially much larger user base. The moral of that? It's still aimed at pros who can afford it because they make money using it, and often charge as much as they used to do decades ago before the digital revolution.
(An example of this sort of pricing could be a car I used to own. It did not have computers in it, well, it only had one, and it broke down. I took it to a registered service centre for that brand, not a small place, and they had it for months, not being able to work out what was wrong. The problem was their technicians could not simply plug it in to a laptop. Getting very annoyed I eventually found the phone number of the CEO of this massive franchise and moaned at him. He was aghast and called in a retired motor engineer who found the problem within two hours. The keycode built in to the key was not recognised. Simple. Car fixed, no charge. Thankfully no charge because they still charged the same hourly rate as if they still employed chaps who did not just plug cars in to a PC. £60 an hour. The no charge bill actually said 300 hours labour! What was truly astonishing was that the man who drove the breakdown truck had told them exactly what the fault was because a code on the dashboard told him!)
Thankfully there are applications that are as good, if not better, and very much cheaper. One other old company create this suite of software >> www.serif.com/en-gb/
One of the causes of it was this history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/Pagemaker.html which became the industry Standard, and it was very very expensive. The reason for that was simple. For a start it ran on the very expensive Apple PC only at first. (You think they are expensive today?!) Only businesses could really afford them. Normally, developers of anything hope to get their outlay back within one to two years. Pagemaker had a limited market at the time, so the price for it was very very high. Not that it mattered because those who could make use of it were not strapped for cash, and could claim the expense back anyway.
Eventually it was adapted to run on IBM compatible PCs. Much cheaper than Apple machines, and far more common. But the cost of Pagemaker did not reduce, because it was still aimed at pros, who could afford it, because they used it to make money. But it also started to get competition from QuarkXPress, which also became an industry Standard, and expensive too!
If you did not have training in either of those you were very fortunate to get a job in the newspaper and magazine creating business, even as a reporter.
Eventually PageMaker lost out, and Adobe bought the rights and it eventually evolved in to Adobe InDesign. And still very expensive, regardless of it now having a potentially much larger user base. The moral of that? It's still aimed at pros who can afford it because they make money using it, and often charge as much as they used to do decades ago before the digital revolution.
(An example of this sort of pricing could be a car I used to own. It did not have computers in it, well, it only had one, and it broke down. I took it to a registered service centre for that brand, not a small place, and they had it for months, not being able to work out what was wrong. The problem was their technicians could not simply plug it in to a laptop. Getting very annoyed I eventually found the phone number of the CEO of this massive franchise and moaned at him. He was aghast and called in a retired motor engineer who found the problem within two hours. The keycode built in to the key was not recognised. Simple. Car fixed, no charge. Thankfully no charge because they still charged the same hourly rate as if they still employed chaps who did not just plug cars in to a PC. £60 an hour. The no charge bill actually said 300 hours labour! What was truly astonishing was that the man who drove the breakdown truck had told them exactly what the fault was because a code on the dashboard told him!)
Thankfully there are applications that are as good, if not better, and very much cheaper. One other old company create this suite of software >> www.serif.com/en-gb/
I actually still have an old Dolch 386 luggable around here with a 20Meg hard drive that I still use for special things from time to time.