I was down in Atlanta visiting a client earlier in the week. In the lobby of the building was an antique machine, a ‘museum piece’.* You know the type. Strange looking, bulky, black metal, lots of pedals, pieces seemingly stuck on at random. One that you just can’t figure out what it might have done ‘once upon a time’.

I noticed it and wandered over to take a closer look (I had a few moments as I waited for my client to come sign me in.).

As I looked it over I felt a wave of nostalgia. I knew this machine. It had been a good friend. We’d had some good times together. (Okay, may the years had erased some of the pain.)

This paricular mchine was an Addressagraph Multigraph Variatyper. Yep. Kind of trips right of the tongue, doesn’t it. (Say it 5 times fast and see if your tongue doesn’t feel funny!). I know this because (and I can already hear Jon now…) yes my fellow proposal pros, I worked on that machine. (Well, maybe not that particular one, but one just like it.)

This machine was used to produce the type used to print newspapers prior to computers. This was in the days of, ‘hot type’. Now, for those unfamilar with this machine, it took molten lead (this was the ‘pain’ part because it needed to constantly be ‘fed’ with blocks of lead (referred to as ‘pigs’… and weighing about 20 lbs… and conveniently packed 5 to a box… yep… 100 lbs.) and, by way of a keyboard, turned it into a piece of type (typical a word or phrase). These peices were then ’set’ into paragraphs by a printer. (In this case meaning a live person whose titled was ‘printer’ (Interestingly, these days I doubt anyone would assume you were referring to a live person if you just mentioned, for instance, ‘I just saw a printer.” :-)

And here’s a bit of trivia to help you win a round of trivial pursuit. The reason the term ‘leading’ is used for adding space between lines in adocument is because that’s how it was done. Quite literally, a thin strip of lead (or when more space was desired, several strips) was placed betwen the rows of type.

But I digress. Back to the story - I thought about this machine (this next piece of info might slow the inevitable comments from Jon just a bit) and the fact that I hadn’t used it all THAT long ago. I mean, this thing wasn’t 100 years old. Nor 50. Not even 40. I’d used it in 1974. A mere 32 years ago. (And I know, I know Jon, you were only HOW old back then? ;-)

On a similar note, as I commented to the participants at a workshop I delivered in Boston (at the Mastering the RFP Process Conference sponsored by IIR), I also did my first couple of proposals (we’re talking about 1982 or so here) prior to - ya ready for this? - word processors (they were just being introduced then..and I think I might have worked on the first ever proposal produced using DecPage - the Digital Equipment Corp. word processing package), laser printers (ditto for those), e-mail (it was available but only on a large green CRT screen) cell phones** (they wouldn’t be on the scene for a long time), CD’s (I tell people we used to put our proposals on vinyl albums - and scarily- every once in a while someone actually believes that we DID that!).

On a similar vein, I recall a presentation given by Brooke Savage (I think it was at a Pragmatech User Forum), where he presented a cover he had produced in, if I remeber correctly, 1985 or so. He showed the cover, which was fairly simple, and explained how it had at that time taken him ‘only’ 5 days to produce. This was in the days before graphics packages had become the norm. Back then, we had artists cutting out pictures and gluing them in place (and I can hear some of you out there - especially those under 30, saying, “Come on. You’re making this stuff up, right?” Nope. That’s the way it was back then.

We’ve come along ways. Look at how we get things done now. automated knowledge bases, graphics packages that allow us to create vitually anything (and if you aren’t using Google’s image feature***, you really should look into it!), word processing that all but types the document for us, etc.

And just imagine how people will be doing proposals (WILL they still be doing them?) in another 30 years.

*This is actually the second machine I’ve worked on that I know of as a museum piece. (Jon is just going to have a field day with this, I just know it!). A machine I worked on while I was a technician - the DEC PDP-8 is in the computer machine in Boston. And I just know there’s probably a few folks reading this who probably worked on similar machines, maybe even machines prior to this. I’d love to hear about them.

**As regards cell phones. My daughter Casey related the following story. She was talking with a niece who is in high school and pointed out that when she had been in high school (a mere 7 years ago) she didn’t have a cell phone. Her niece asked her, ‘What did you do in school all day if you couldn’t text your friends?”

***Please remember that images pulled from any source might be subject to copyright and use them appropriately.