Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site glacier.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!nsc!glacier!reid From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) Newsgroups: net.text Subject: Re: embedded-command text systems Message-ID: <1919@glacier.ARPA> Date: Tue, 3-Dec-85 11:48:16 EST Article-I.D.: glacier.1919 Posted: Tue Dec 3 11:48:16 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 5-Dec-85 07:49:46 EST References: <471@harvard.ARPA> <773@mmintl.UUCP> <734@tpvax.fluke.UUCP> <1861@glacier.ARPA> <116@utastro.UUCP> Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) Distribution: net Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab Lines: 35 If you look at the interaction of technology and industry for the past few hundred years, you will see a recurring theme. A new technology gets invented. The in-place industry applies that technology to automate what they are currently doing. This is often inefficient, as the new technology is often better applied by changing the fundamental premises of the industry. Gradually new companies grow up, which use the new technology in a different way, and if it is more cost-effective, then the new industry drives the old one out of business. The "obvious" application of computer technology to the graphic arts industry is to give them computer systems that mimic the way they have been doing business--wysiwyg systems. Naturally they will prefer this. A non-obvious approach is to eliminate the graphic arts industry, applying the new technology to make 80% of its work force redundant. Then it doesn't matter what they think. I claim that, for a wide range of publications, the traditional graphic-arts industry approach of cutting, pasting, and wysiwyg systems simply cannot be competitive with more software-intensive approaches such as embedded-command systems. You will be trading one programmer for 4 graphic artists. At the moment we are in a transition phase. The graphic arts industry is discovering computers, and they are molding them in their own image, taking the things that they have done by hand since the invention of cold type and putting them isomorphically onto the computer. Simultaneously, however, thousands of businesses are discovering that they don't NEED the graphic arts industry. With simple computer tools they can achieve their end results--the publication of books or newsletters or catalogs--without graphic artists. If history serves as any guide, then in half a generation the traditionalist approach will no longer be competitive and will have to pull out of those markets completely. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA