The Cole Papers., 90, December 1999

Welcome to my picture desk: At ANPA/Tec '90, much floor space was devoted to picture desks. Here, Reuters' Mitch Koppleman chats with Gary Fong, photo and technology executive from the San Francisco Chronicle.

At the start of the decade, picture desks were all the rage

Digital photography -- and the devices designed to handle the sudden influx of digital photos, electronic picture desks -- were the lead topic of 1990.

In the beginning of the year, the Associated Press -- anxious to rid itself of an expensive land-based telephone network that distributed analog photos to dry-silver paper receivers at 950 member newspapers -- announced that it would change, over a three-year period, to a digital satellite picture delivery system that would require newspapers to choose a picture desk. Ultimately, the wire service would offer papers a "free" picture desk, the one developed by Leaf Systems.

But that was later; in early 1990, there was competition in the picture desk market and it was much discussed at the National Press Photographer's Digital Conference in February and the Seybold Seminars in March. In fact, the Digital Conference, held in Washington, D.C., had 800 in attendance, remarkably large for a new conference.

In our coverage, we outlined the minimum functions of an electronic photo system (our preferred moniker, since one supplier trademarked "picture desk"):

Bring in pictures from both analog and digital networks.

Sort pictures into various categories (in a robust database).

Control overall tonal adjustments, "dodge-and-burn," pixel editing and cropping.

Output to various devices, including Ecrm's Autokon 1000, high-end color systems (Scitex, Hell, Crosfield, Dainippon Screen), desktop systems and to various formats ("TIFF is an absolute minimum").

From those requirements, we carved the market into two pieces -- the low-end systems (which included Burkel PhotoStore, Levien 450 Screen, National Digital Photo Management Workstations and "non-proprietary" systems that included The Color Group's FotoFlow and DPS Typecraft's ImageBuilder) and high-end systems (the AP Electronic Picture System that ran on Digital Equipment Corp. VAX computers, the Crosfield NewsLine 2600, the Sinclair K2000 and the Leaf Picture Desk). In addition, Agence France-Presse and Reuters both leased systems to newspapers.

In the spring of 1990, market penetration was limited. Fewer than 40 papers had picture desks, with the lion's share to Crosfield.

Our evaluation of the various products drew us most to the AP Electronic Picture System, which we said, "seems to be the easiest to use product and certainly has the best display." We did note that users complained that it was "painfully slow" and "very expensive."

Another big concern was that digital photo files were too large. "A day's worth of just one wire service's output [would be] more than 100 megabytes," we lamented. "Six years ago, 80-megabyte disk drives held the entire text file for [a] metro daily."

The cure seemed to be something called the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) algorithm for photo compression, which in those days was implemented in hardware. The fastest systems used chips from C-Cube Inc. of San Jose, which we visited.

Out of ANPA/Tec '90 (back then, the trade organization was called the American Newspaper Publishers Association) held in Las Vegas, there were a number of other picture desk announcements: What was then known as Harris Composition unveiled its Images picture system; an advisory committee was established to advise the Associated Press on implementing PhotoStream, the digital picture service; the AP said it had published a document on how other picture desk suppliers could interface to PhotoStream; Crosfield passed marketing of its NewsLine picture desk to Camex; UPI said it would market NewsLine and a company called Independent Network Systems said it would develop a $30,000 picture desk system based on the Amiga computer.

The big announcement at ANPA/Tec '90, though, was that Atex, a division of Eastman Kodak Co., hadn't been sold. The rumor mill had it that IBM would buy Atex; it turned out that the two merely had an alliance, whereby the computer mainframe company would sell Atex products and Atex would base its next products on IBM machines.

We asked, "How long will it take to port over the core technology -- the guts of the current Atex system runs on a modified DEC computer known as a J-11 -- to IBM platforms?"

Paul Williams, then the systems editor of the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., answered, "I suspect the death of the J-11 is exaggerated. Trying to port that code is going to be a time-consuming task."

In other ANPA/Tec '90 news, we pondered the status of what was then known as DuPont/Camex, a company amalgamated by the merger of the former Hendrix-Hastech, Crosfield and Camex businesses late the year before. We were disappointed that DuPont/Camex had cancelled development on an OS/2 and DEC VAX editorial system called Whirlwind. "Camex is promising an all-Unix front-end system," we wrote.

Later in the year, the big topic was the Publishing Interchange Language (PIL). Promoted by suppliers such as Atex and Quark, the concept was that users could move page geometry between dissimilar systems -- conjuring visions of an editor designing a page on a Macintosh in Quark XPress and having it come out of an Atex front-end system.

Not all were entranced with this de facto standard: "We're going to skip the PIL," said an executive at one company, "and use the rhythm method."

Despite its use at a couple of papers for page geometry interchange, the PIL never caught on.

John Warnock, chief executive of Adobe Systems Inc., wrote an article for the August 1990 issue of Publish magazine, which outlined what he called "electronic paper" that would be able to exchange documents between dissimiliar computers and dissimilar applications. Adobe was working on a product -- code-named Carousel -- that would solve the problem. Because of trademark issues, the product is eventually named Acrobat and the technology is called Portable Document Format.

At the start of the decade, picture desks were all the rage

From THE COLE PAPERS, December 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.