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?
