At “Parent Night” at my son’s first week of camp, I conjured up nostalgic memories of my own time at camp, and the fun I had as a youth. Then realized I never went to camp as a kid and that my found memories were probably based on scenes from “Meatballs.”
Then realized I never went to camp as a kid and that my misty, water-colored memories were probably based on scenes from “Meatballs.”
When I was hired at an ad agency in the spring of 1993, I had been working in desktop publishing for about five years.
Back in those “good old days” computers were physically bigger than modern models, but most things about them were smaller and slower. A workstation equipped to do graphic design, photo retouching and digital illustration, might have a hard-drive capacity of less than 1 gigabyte (many had less than 500 MEGAbytes). Processor speeds and maximum RAM were minuscule by today’s standards.
Thus, I spent a lot of my twenties waiting on computers to: boot up, launch software, open files, print…
In the summer of 1993, my then-employer bought a single desktop license of Aldus Fetch, a media database that was an ancestor of Extensis Portfolio.
Fetch was installed on the computer of an artist who maintained the collection of line art for our largest client. One morning he demonstrated Fetch for me. It was one of the few times in my career where I had a new (to me) software experience that might be described as “love at first click.”
I was (momentarily) stunned to the point of silence that this tool allowed me to see a thumbnail preview of an image or illustration. A user didn’t have to click through the unending, nested layers of ambiguously-named folders on a server, or wait several minutes for Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand…to launch and open a file.
Furthermore, Fetch allowed users to describe files with keywords so that individual products could be more easily found. These features are commonplace now—in desktop tools such as iPhoto and on enterprise servers—but they were edgy for graphic libraries in the early 1990s.
Here is a demo of Fetch 1.0 (accessibility notes… this is a screen-recording of a Fetch 1.0 demo running on an early Macintosh operating system. Demo shows Fetch being opened, media thumbnails, and metadata fields):
It doesn’t look like all that much from a modern vantage point, but it solved some key art-management problems three decades ago. My first encounter with Fetch caused me to hear Etta James singing in my head:
At last
My love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song
(Full disclosure that song is almost always in my head, but Fetch made me hear it—and eventually sing it—kinda loud).
Fetch was an early entry into the space of that I would later know as “digital asset management” (DAM). My immediate realization of the value of the solution provided (even that first version), eventually it led to a change in the course of my career.
What are some of your Etta James moments?
About 2/3 of the way through my 2nd grade year, my family moved two hours to the north. I found myself in a different state in a century-old school building. But curiously, my new county had the same name as my old county…am I allowed to say “Middlesex” on the Internet?
Old School
The first story I remember reading in my new class was “Old Lucy Lindy” a tale about a woman who baked pies.
Ms. Lindy had a recurring problem in that once a pie was baked, neither she, nor her customers, knew what kind of pie it was.
Her solution was to etch short-hand descriptors in the pie crusts before they went in the oven:
1. For mince pies she wrote, I.M. for “Is Mince” and
2. For other pies she wrote, I.M. for “Isn’t Mince”
And hilarious antics ensued (probably they ensued, I don’t remember details).
Eventually, I worked in publishing, advertising and eventually content management. Ms. Lindy’s metadata strategy, as dubious as it was, is eclipsed some of the ones I’ve seen in real life.
What is your earliest memory of bad metadata?
(The story “Old Lucy Lindy” was written by Bill Martin, Jr. who later authored several children’s books such as “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” and “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?” (as well as a few other bear-centric, sensory books)
June has been a bit of blur.
For my wife and me, the month began with a 1:00 AM phone call where we learned that our son had bagged his first deer—with a 4-door Honda.
We were relieved that neither he or his friend were injured. However, we had to say goodbye to our venerable Civic.
Oh Deer Me
A few days later, I finished up the school year.
Then a couple of days after that we left for vacation–as they say in Michigan, we went “Up North” for a week of hiking, dining out, visiting charming Lakeshore towns, and a healthy amount of loafing in our rental’s screened-in porch with a scenic forest overlook.
We returned to Grand Rapids and began car shopping. When our son had moved out a while ago, his plan was to borrow the Civic and he would eventually buy a car of his own.
Though Lori and I had been getting by with sharing one car for several months we decided to provide our insurance settlement money to him. He got a small loan from his credit union and bought his first vehicle. We didn’t even have to co-sign anything! The kid is pretty good at “adulting.”
For the first time this millennium, I live in a one-car household. I’m not all that into cars, so I’m good with that. I had a meeting last week and walked two miles (sorry not barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways) to get there.
