IMAGING MAGAZINE CELEBRATES FIVE YEARS IN A TIMELESS INDUSTRY
For Imaging Magazine's 60th anniversary issue, we look at the past and future of imaging and related technologies. First, we take a whirlwind tour of time, view the origins of imaging and glimpse its distant future. Then we see what changes a key imaging pioneer thinks are in store.
n this industry changes, half a decade seems like an eternity. Many great imaging products have hit the scene since we started publishing in early 1992 -- 60 issues ago.
Lots of bright, hard-working people have brought their clever ideas to fruition and to market, making it easier for everyone to manage their information.
But what is imaging? In essence, it's a technology for storing and conveying knowledge. It's not the only technology, just one of the latest. Such technologies are far more than a few years old. In fact, they're as old as language itself.
Jump back with me in time, WAY back, to about 50,000 years ago. In that era, some researchers believe, grunting and gesturing had become sufficiently advanced that humans first learned to communicate in language. We spoke and remembered words. We conveyed knowledge through speech and stored it in our heads -- two vastly different technologies.
Oral literature capped this multi-millennia trend. These folks had incredible memories. They carried around, in their heads, enormous works like Homer's epic poems and the Bible, passing them orally to the next generation.
Problem was, people could only store so much in their heads (i.e. they ran out of brain-RAM). That limited the amount of knowledge in the world.
Now jump ahead, to about 5,000 years ago -- the invention of writing. Sumerians inscribed cuneiform symbols on hard-to-handle clay tablets. Egyptians wrote their hieroglyphics on nice, scrollable papyrus. (With wooden scroll-bars.) These ancients literally invented the document -- a SINGLE technology that both stores and conveys knowledge.
Written language caused the first great explosion of knowledge. Hence the library at Alexandria.
Writing had much to do with the birth of civilization.
Now jump to 500 years ago. Knowledge workers of the Middle Ages worked the same way their ancient counterparts did: They scribbled. Scribes scribbled parchment scraps in script. (Say that five times fast.) But suddenly, everything changed again. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. His technology automated the process of producing documents -- and caused the second great knowledge explosion. Medieval darkness ended in a societal rebirth, or renaissance.
Now jump to 50 years ago. The Gutenberg Glut is well underway. Print is everywhere. We've gone from papyrus to parchment, then paper, but documents are still tangible objects.
Enter the computer, sparking the third great revolution in human knowledge.
Now, knowledge can be stored and conveyed as patterns of electrical signals. It's free to roam the electronic universe. It's easier to create, store, manipulate, convert and convey. With their power to link people and ideas effortlessly, computers hold the seeds of our next great cultural flowering -- call it the "millennaissance."
From 50, jump to 15 years ago. The PC is born. Minicomputers begin their encroach on the mainframe. Most, if not all, computing is data processing, and that data is characters -- letters, numbers. It's all new stuff, entered on keyboards and punched cards. But what about all the knowledge ALREADY stored on paper?
Along comes imaging. A few pioneering companies, such as FileNet and Wang, create computer systems that turn paper to electronic images. Imaging brings paper into the world of computers. It captures the image of a sheet of paper and puts it on a computer screen. This means that people can do ALL their work on the computer, instead of switching back and forth between a modern technology and one that's 5,000 years old.
Now jump from 15 to five years ago. PCs get more powerful. Imaging vendors breed like rabbits. Components like scanners, storage devices, high-res monitors get cheaper. Software gets smarter and more diverse. Imaging Magazine begins publication. A market is born.
Near term, the trends we've seen in the last five years will continue and accelerate. Imaging hardware will proliferate, cut costs and fit well within even shrinking budgets. As PCs and networks juice up more, imaging software will get ever more versatile and amorphous. It will become part of components, plug-ins, applets, agents, avatars and whatever future iterations of intelligent modules there may be.
Imaging extends the third great knowledge revolution (computers) to include the second (printing) and the first (writing). It carries centuries of tangible documents into the digital aeons to come. Where are we heading?
How with the Internet transform the document? Is imaging obsolete? Is paper?
No way. Paper isn't going to disappear, any more than movable type banished scribbling, or writing stopped people from talking. People will always store and convey knowledge on paper.
What WILL happen is that the whirr of digitization's Knowledge-O-Matic will pick up speed, mangling our already morphing categories still further. Image, the first big-file data type to enter the mix, will be joined by voice and full-motion video as elements in our ever-more-enmeshed networks of knowledge distribution. (The Web is just one of the first such networks.) In fact, computer telephony is already heralding this trend.
Ultimately, all three revolutionary forms of managed knowledge -- written and printed paper and electronic documents -- will merge with prerevolutionary speech and gestures to form a complete environment for digitized knowledge.
As the last step before computer-aided telepathy (and just think of the switching equipment THAT will require!), we may even evolve new forms of digitized grunting.
maging is changing the world. Remember how the Macintosh changed the way computing worked? In the same way, imaging has changed the way the world works. While we have yet to achieve a paperless society (if we ever do), imaging has made information easier to process, move around and access.
As in most industries, imaging has its pioneers. People who led the charge. People who met the challenge head on. Rather than try to name them all, Imaging Magazine has chosen the person we feel has made the biggest contribution to date.
The 1997 Imaging Pioneer of the Year is Ted Smith. Ted is president and CEO of FileNet (Costa Mesa, CA 714-966-3400), the $200 million imaging giant. That's an amazing feat for a company that started in 1982 with just six employees and no revenues.
Within eight months, FileNet had 50 engineers and programmers. In March 1985, the company shipped their first product -- with Unix workstations, a Unix file server, an optical disc library and a million lines of software code. This system went into the Security Pacific Bank in LA (since taken over by the Bank of America -- but still a client!). It was revolutionary in the mid-'80s, but today, we call this a "client/server architecture."
Just in case you're wondering about FileNet's achievements, there are several. These include developing and marketing the world's first commercial document imaging system, workflow process management software and COLD software. Not bad for a company that was just a dream 15 years ago. Today, FileNet is the largest provider of business process automation software. But every company needs a leader. Filenet's is Ted Smith, the man who put it all together.
To say Ted Smith is a visionary is an understatement. A computer industry pioneer since 1960, he has worked in many areas including engineering, marketing and management.
After graduating with a BS in engineering from the University of Maryland in 1953, he spent two years in the Air Force as a radar officer.
Bitten by the electronics bug, he joined Gilfillan Corporation as assistant to the VP of engineering. His career in the computer industry began a few years later, when he joined Packard-Bell Computer as VP of marketing.
In 1968, he joined a startup called Sycor, which was developing intelligent terminals for remote data entry. After building Sycor to $100 million in revenue as executive VP, he left to become president of Basic Four Corporation, one of the innovators in the small business computer industry.
In five years, the company grew from $40 million to $230 million in product revenues. Despite this massive revenue growth, Smith was fired because he was too independent for the corporate parent in New York.
He then started looking at ways to make companies more productive with optical disc technology -- the start of FileNet, yet another enormous success story.
Apart from making the companies he worked for great, Smith has contributed to the imaging industry in other ways.
He's an active member of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), and a past board member. His biggest achievement is making AIIM more responsive to software companies. Smith is also active in education. He served as chairman of the CEO Roundtable at the University of California, Irvine and is currently the Chair of the University of California's Department of Information and Computer Science advisory board at Irvine.
In the future, Smith hopes to fulfil his vision of enabling access to literally any document from any desktop in customer organizations.
