Someday my grandchildren will ask me: What was the biggest disaster you ever witnessed? And I will answer them: The summer of 1998, the day Time Magazine was late at Roto-Smeets.

To say it was a disaster is an understatement. To miss the deadline of Time Magazine back then was an apocalypse, unforgiveable. When the Platemaster system went down, the board of directors was notified as well as the executive team of Roto-Smeets, one of the largest printers in Europe. Time specified in their contract that if you were late, then the contract was broken and they could go elsewhere. And I was there when it happened.

I was actually there to do damage control over another bloop-up, otherwise known as Prescript I. You see, back then, Creo didn’t have the PDF workflow today known as Prinergy. Instead it had a Postscript-based system called Platemaster, which was actually years ahead of its time. That workflow had a fanatical following that held onto the system years after Prinergy started to dominate the large printer space. But it did have some flaws, like no trapping. Or color management. Oh yeah, and because it was Postscript-based, and because back then Windows servers topped out at 350mhz, every once in a while the RIP would barf on a imposed signature of Postscript, usually at the worst possible time.

Prescript was suppose to fix the RIP barfs, by “cleaning” the Postscript so that there would be no surprises at the end of the line, when it was time to make plates. I joined the Prescript team just after the release of Prescript I. How well did it work? About as well as any version I of any software product. Not well enough (cough) to meet the expectations of our customer base.

Creo Europe was especially upset about Prescript. Okay, they were pissed. A lot of big deals were on the edge because Prescript had been advertised to fix the RIP barfs which were killing the platemakers and it when it had been released, it stank out the joint.
Earlier in the year, I had been sent on a fact-finding tour to gather problem files and generally offer my Johny-Canuck butt to various customers so they could kick it and feel better. Now I had returned with version 2 to save the day, be a hero, and not incidentally, get some deals closed so that Creo Europe could have a good quarter.

Roto-Smeets was one of those customers that needed some impressing. And then one of their Platemaster systems blew up. Okay I wasn’t actually there when the moment of disaster struck, it was actually Matthieu Bossan who bore eyewitness testimony. Matthieu was one of two (count ‘em, two) application engineers employed by Creo Europe in 1998 (The other one was Tomas Leferverbre. We also had a demo specialist by the name of Stefan Steinle who knew his way around Platemaster. Stefan had the joy of demonstration Prescript to various customer - “Here is Prescript ripping its way through a job…, Scheiße! it crashed again…”)

So Matthieu goes in to install a service pack on one of the Platemaster servers. He installs the service and does a reboot. He waits for the server to come back up again. And waits… and waits. Baby that server is hard down, as in hardware down. Service call goes into DEC and the parts won’t come in until after Time Magazine is due to hit the trucks.

Now the Roto-Smeets guys weren’t dumb, they had TWO platemaster systems. But in the summer of 1998, ad revenue for TIME was good and the size of the magazine had grown and grown, meaning more pages and more signatures and more plates that had to be imagined in finite amount of time So some calculations were made and oh scheiße they weren’t going to make ALL plates in time according to the contract.

And that’s where things stood the day that we will suppose to go into Roto-Smeets and do the Prescript II install. Everybody was in shock. We were told not to wear any Creo golf shirts or T-shirts or anything like that. But the Creo Europe guys were happy to see us from Vancouver. Rolo-Smeets was based in Holland and one thing about the Dutch is that they are raised by their moms and dads to be nice to Canadians (This is because of WWII, when the First Canadian Army liberated Holland from the Nazis in 1944. Every year in my hometown of Ottawa, there is a tulip festival when the Dutch send bulbs in gratitude).

So there we were, a group of Canadian stuck in the plant where Time was late, with a few Creo Belgians who made sure the Canadians were close at hand when the Dutch customers hovered around. Paul B. eventually showed up with the server that we were supposed to install Prescript on. Paul was so like many other prepress sys admins I meet over the years, capable and tough and squeezed on one side by buggy software and systems that didn’t quite work well together, and squeezed on the other side by upper management that didn’t understand IT very well but knew the cost of everything. So Paul was under a lot of pressure, and had been for quite awhile.

So I set to work on the server and of course the Prescript II application doesn’t want to install. Two hours later, the script that should have taken 3 minutes to run kept barfing. Of course this was the cherry on top of the icing of a scheiße cake. Finally we figure it out and I remember the exact solution more than 10 years later. For some strange reason the CD drive was mapped to the C: drive on the computer and on Windows NT 4.0 that causes the installer to abort. So we mapped the CD-ROM to another letter and it worked. Then Paul pulled out some crappy Postscript files that causes Prescript I to barf and they worked through Prescript II just fine. So we were able to retreat with some dignity that day.

The very next day I was part of a team to fly into Norway to install Prescript at another hot site. We nearly got stuck in Oslo when the unions in Norway decided to call a general strike. We asked just what the heck they were striking over but nobody could tell us the reason why, they had so much stinking oil up there and it was a nice summer day so why not call a general strike. There was only one flight out of the country in three days and we made that flight, the plane had been allowed to take off because it had organs aboard that were needed for a transplant patient in France.

When all the dust settled Roto-Smeets didn’t lose Time and eventually ordered a third Platemaster system. They may or may not have used the incident to get first dibs in Europe on a super-secret product that Creo was working on at the time, code name Araxi. I joined that team in autumn of 1998 and after about 3 name changes, the Araxi team released Prinergy in late 1999. Roto-Smeets was the first European customer of Prinergy and they made the first plate in Europe from the Prinergy system. I know this for sure because I was there when the plate was imaged. It was a VLF plate, 16-up, and Prinergy ate the signature like it was ice cream and spat out the plate so fast that Roto-Smeets never had to worry about being for Time, or any other job, every again.

And so Prinergy was released and the world changed for so many of us in the prepress universe but it was so very groovy because we were at the center of it all. The future looked to be without limits as Creo grew and grew and the dot com boomed and whatever we touched seemed to be put on the verge of a wonderful transformation. Like a previous generation in 1968 we had our summer of limitless possibilities and like that generation that had the betrayal of Watergate and the tragedy of Vietnam, we had the dot com crash and September 11th, 2001.

As for the European guys, Paul got eventually promoted and it still working at Smeets as far as I know. Matthieu got kicked upstairs to management. Tomas kept working in apps until I lost touch with him. Stefan moved to Vancouver and became the Prinergy product manager for about 3 years until he moved back to Munich with a wife and a baby - a little Canuck baby. As for me, I live in a little house in Vancouver with my wife and three small children who are sweet and innocent (like we all were once) and with a future that has limitless possibilities.

And so it goes.