As some of you know I’ve been writing about this industry for 27 years now. That’s a long time. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun even if you don’t realize you’ve been having fun.
I started in 1986 writing for Office Systems (later to be called Office Solutions), a magazine aimed at decision makers in SMBs, followed by its sister publication, Office Dealer in 1988. At the time there were tons of other publications aimed at both end users within offices and the dealer community. Magazines like Today’s Office, The Office (I spent two and a half years there.), Office World News, Geyers, Managing Office Technology, and others that I can’t remember. When I’d travel to the NOMDA (National Office Machine Dealers Association) show or the NOPA (National Office Products Association) show, the press contingents covering those events were sizable. It wasn’t weighted so heavily back then towards the analyst community…or so it seemed.
If I’d known I was going to spend so much time in this industry, I might have paid more attention to what was going on when I first started. I thought I’d do a year and then move onto some sort of entertainment publication like where I had my first full-time writing gig or maybe writing screenplays or comedy. Turns out I found myself a niche and a home; it just took me more than ten years to figure that out.
The reason I’m reflecting on these publications, all of whom are defunct, most never making it into the digital age, is that there was a wealth of historical data prior to the early 1990’s that’s likely been forever lost with the demise of those publications. Consider The Office, a monthly that began publishing in the late thirties and closed its doors around 1993. Nothing, absolutely nothing was ever digitized there. The editors were still using typewriters and pasting up the magazine by hand when the curtain finally fell. Same is true for most of those other publications even if they weren’t as far behind the times as The Office. Considering that hard copies of those magazines are mostly gone forever, the history contained within those pages is gone forever as well. I still have a few issues of Office Systems/Office Solutions and The Office that I’ve kept over the years. I had much more, but those ended up being weeded out during various moves.
Although I lament the loss of the history contained in those aforementioned publications, there’s still hope that a lot of the industry’s history hasn’t been completely lost. BTA still has every issue ever published going back to 1949 in its various incarnations—NOMDA Spokesman, Business Technology Solutions, and Solutions. The same is true of The Cannata Report where Frank Cannata has back issues of his publications going back to when he first started publishing in 1982.
I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel a little bit better.
Thanks for reading.
