1996 Is Calling, and So Is Seybold San Francisco

By Patrick Henry on July 8th, 2008

I don’t know if editors are more prone to pack-rat behavior than other people, but pack-rattitude has to be the reason that this editor still has in his possession an expo CD-ROM from the Seybold Seminars San Francisco Conference in 1996.

It turned up by accident the other day in a search for something else, enabling me to use the word “serendipitous” correctly in this sentence. Sliding the disc into the computer, I quickly forgot about the original object of my rummaging.

CDs were relative novelties as collateral material for conferences in 1996, when covering any industry event meant leaving room in one’s luggage for the five to 10 pounds of hard-copy press kits that invariably would make the trip home with the attendee. Consistent with the rise of non-print media that were rewriting the rules of publishing—and shaping the fate of the Seybold Seminars—at the time, this CD presented the entire conference program in a format that also had something of a shiny-new-kid air, interactive PDF.

Then, the conference CD was an innovative paper-saver (as were the 48 digital “totebags” of exhibitor information included in the disk). Now, it’s a valuable time capsule: a freeze-framed portrait of an industry being transformed in ways that only the hindsight of 12 years can illuminate.

The conference session summaries and the exhibitor descriptions are full of clues about how far the industry had yet to travel along a path whose direction it didn’t fully comprehend in 1996, a year when it was still possible to offer a session with a straight-faced debate about whether “the Internet phenomenon is about to collapse of its own weight.”

The CD also is a wistful reminder of how much the Seybold Seminars are missed by those who were fortunate enough to take part in them. For many years, they were must-attend venues where all of the most important announcements about desktop publishing, computerized print production, and, eventually, Web-based publishing routinely were made.

As Craig Cline, then program development director, notes in the CD, Seybold San Francisco was in a class by itself as the “tribal rite” for the publishing industry. Today the shows are remembered, as Andy Tribute predicted they would be upon learning of their cancellation in 2005, “for first identifying the potential of the World Wide Web and the Internet to change the face of printing, publishing, and the media.”

Above all, they were exciting to go to. The Seybold Seminars were part Disney World, part think tank, and part San Francisco block party. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and everyone else who was anyone in popular computing used them as pulpits. Vendors of creative, prepress, and output technologies of all kinds lined up to exhibit at them.

The programs had the same authority and reputation as the namesake publications that inspired them: The Seybold Report and The Seybold Bulletin, periodicals that, as produced by their founding editorial team, have never been equaled in scope or quality as journals of record for digital publishing.

Some of the flavor of the Seybold events comes through in extracts from the CD: snippets of conference and expo information that seem backward- and forward-looking at the same time. By taking us almost all the way back to square one in digital prepress and output, the vendor blurbs highlight how much progress we have made since:

“The (Xerox) DocuColor 40 heralds a new era in digital document production—a four color process print engine that delivers an unprecedented 40 full-color pages per minute.”

“A.B Dick Company will be exhibiting the Itek Graphix Digital Platemaster designed to simplify the platemaking process. The DPM 2000 provides a digital equivalent of mechanical composing. The built-in scanner serves as a graphic camera, the computerized layout software replaces the stripping table and the digitized plate completely eliminates intermediate supplies.”

“Halftone, continuous tone, B&W and on-screen proofing devices will surround a live demonstration of the Trendsetter, Creo’s new semi-automated platesetter.”

“The (Indigo) E-Print 1000 is the world’s most widely used digital color press with over 500 presses shipped globally.”

“Using thermal plate technology, the (Gerber) Crescent/42T takes computer-to-plate one step farther by eliminating the need for a darkroom and processing units and replacing the argon laser of the Crescent/42 with a high-powered YAG laser.”

“Displayed are Tektronix Phaser™ color printers featuring Adobe PostScript™ Level 2 and full color output at speeds up to 5 ppm. Media sizes range from postcard to tabloid bleeds with printer resolutions ranging from 300 to 1,200 dpi.”

“Xeikon has developed the world’s fastest digital color print engine for heavy duty use and monthly volumes of 500,000 pages.”

The seminar titles speak for themselves as indicators of what was on publishers’ minds in 1996:

“Is There a Future for PostScript?”
“ROI of CTP & Digital Printing”
“Cost Models for Electronic Publishing”
“Will the Web Go Away If I Ignore It?”
“Java: Reality or Hype?”

So do the conference session summaries:

“With 17 digital plates and 42 models of CTP devices, there are more than enough choices. Users are now simultaneously deciding if they should implement CTP and on which CTP system and which CTP plate. Pass the Prozac, please.”

“What began in 1993 with two suppliers now includes over ten alternatives from copiers with RIPs to electronic presses to hybrid platemaking and printing systems.”

“How does the online experience differ from the traditional media of movies, TV, radio and print? What lessons about media interaction should publishers keep in mind when designing services?”

“Much like typesetting at the dawn of desktop publishing, the photographic industry is being turned on its head by imaging technologies and new distribution methods.”

No conference before or since has come close to matching the Seybold Seminars for topical richness. But the very diversity of the program probably was one of the things that led to its demise. As the “new media” pushed to the fore, printers started to complain that the conference sessions were too heavily skewed toward Web developers. The Web audience, impatient for their share of the limelight, saw too much emphasis on traditional print.

Changes of ownership, the post 9/11 economic downturn, and the dot.com bust in the printing space wrought their own damage, and by 2005, the Seybold Seminars had been left behind by the same digital publishing technology sectors that they had helped to create. In this article, Tribute and other old hands of the Seybold organization comment on what went wrong and what was lost.

But all wasn’t lost. The Seybold Report continues to be published as a newsletter by an information provider that acquired it in 2006, with many of the original journal’s writers as current contributors. And for those of us who can’t let go of 12-year-old CDs and other relics of the Seybold Seminars, their memory will always be as evocative of San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge or the cable cars.