March 19, 1989

IT’S BEEN QUITE a week, full of agonizing decisions. Should I go on with Geraldo and debate the cons of computer pornography with the notorious Chuck Farnham of Digital Deviations fame? I consulted my Magic 8 Ball. “Outlook not so good,” it said. So just by a whisker in Geraldo’s mustache, I maintained my journalistic integrity and went to the Seybold Conference on desktop publishing instead.

COLOR MY WORLD: One of the few big deals at Seybold was Aldus Corp.’s announcement of OPI, an Open Prepress Interface standard. Prepress is an electronic process that helps printers refine the images (text and color pictures) on a page before they are printed. Aldus’ OPI proposes a standard file format — TIFF, Tag Image File Format — that eliminates some of the back-and-forth manual paste-up that is still done today.

I supposed this kind of technology would put a lot of people out of work, but Tony Bove and Cheryl Rhodes of Gualala (in Mendocino County), who publish the newsletter Inside Report on Desktop Publishing and Multimedia, think otherwise. They were at the Seybold conference and told me that the 50,000 prepress vendors in the U.S. have 1 million customers. “If their customers start to include desktop publishing users, they’ll actually have more business, not less,” Bove said.

Much more the issue, they say, is the growing popularity of color copiers — poised to cause the same massive shift in the black-and-white printing industry that desktop publishing did to the printing press. “The market for color copiers is going to explode,” Bove said. “People who need to differentiate themselves, large corporations and small businesses, are going to buy them. And if they can’t afford one, they’ll go to a quick-print shop to get them printed.”

Color copies are not yet widespread because they are expensive. Despite the fact that Xerox Corp. had the first full-color copier in 1973, Canon’s state-of-the-art machine costs $39,000. A Brother copier is only $8,500, but its quality is moderate and its per-page cost is high, around 65 cents, because it requires special paper.

“I believe (color copiers) are going to come down to about $5,000 in a few years, just like laser printers did,” Bove said.

CHALK ONE UP: Our civil liberties are a little safer because of some forceful action by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in Palo Alto. For several years, CPSR has been preparing a study about proposed additions to the FBI’s computer system, the National Crime Information Center. The system contains only public records, but the FBI had proposed that the second generation, NCIC 2000, contain a “tracking” feature for people under investigation.

Under this proposal, any district attorney or authorized officer could start an NCIC file on you, whether or not you had been convicted of a crime. When Joe or Jane Police Officer punched your name into the computer for a traffic violation, a “silent hit” signal would be sent invisibly to the office investigating you.

Sound like a slight invasion of privacy? Ripe for abuse of power? CPSR thought so, and so did Rep. Don Edwards, D-San Jose, a member of the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (part of the House’s Committee on the Judiciary), which reviewed the NCIC 2000 and CPSR’s report.

The tracking proposal was removed, and Edwards wrote a letter to CPSR thanking the organization for its “splendid work” on the NCIC report. “I look forward to continuing to rely on CPSR’s expertise and commitment to civil liberties,” Edwards wrote. Amen.

GOOD TIMING: Macworld magazine hit the streets last week with a truly poetic April Fool’s spoof by Steven Levy, the Macworld columnist and New York author of “Hackers.” Levy’s Iconoclast column detailed a fake meeting with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and some IBM executives who were giving him a sneak preview of a $1,000 color Mac clone. (For the uninitiated, you can’t touch a color Mac for less than $5,000.)

Macworld’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing, mostly from people who were delighted to be taken for such a ride. Others, for reasons unfathomable, were angry. Newspapers have covered the uproar, but none of the reports I’ve seen mentioned the Cable News Network vignette featuring Levy, Apple Product’s president Jean Louis Gassee, and an IBM representative. Gassee said he wished Apple could have pulled a prank that good, but the prize for most tongue-in-cheek comment goes to the IBM guy, who said, “IBM does not comment on unannounced products.”