I was trawling the Internet this evening and couldn’t help but let you know about this little piece of history I found.  Not that I’m one to harp on about the good old days but some of the people working within the pre-media industry now are too young to have even worked with ISDN, to remember how easy it was to get files to and from customers.  There was only one way of sending files via ISDN - 4-Sight or Hermstedt.

For those old timers in the industry who remember using ISDN here’s an article by John Henshall called “SAY GOODBYE TO THE WORLDWIDE WAIT“.  It gives a good insight into what ISDN did for the graphic arts industry and is a completely nostalgic trip down memory lane.  Written in 2000 it really wasn’t that long ago either, shows how quickly technology and in particular file transfer technology moves forward!

As the last supplier of ISDN products to the graphic arts and prepress industry I feel its our duty to provide for users a bit of the history of file transfer.  John’s story reflects the position of many graphics businesses of the time who wanted to reduce the time to market and reduce the cost of sending disks, scans and other images using couriers.

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Do you use ISDN, do any of your customers ask for files to be ISDN’d?  Probably not which is in stark contrast to five or six years ago.  It would be fair to say that ISDN file transfer isn’t anywhere near as popular a file transfer protocol as it used to be.  It was hit for 6 when the Internet came along and now Internet file transfer products are becoming easier and easier to use so ISDN’s being used less and less.

So why ISDN anyway?  Back in the mid 80’s Apple launched the first Mac’s which were rapidly adopted by the creative companies and so the creative process became digital.  And….?  Well this meant that artwork was saved as digital files and not paperbased or scans as before.  Creative companies were now sending files on disks by courier to newspapers, printers and publishers and this meant that the time to market could be several days with proofs being faxed around and with all the courier costs it wasn’t exactly cheap!

4-Sight initially developed a range of products starting in around 1989 enabling point to point file transfer over ISDN.  The Internet wasn’t even a concept that was widely heard of until the 90’s so a dial up connection was the way forward.  The graphic arts industry was revolutionised in a very short time, the time taken by the creative process was slashed and adverts could be sent to market the same day - in fact within minutes!!

4-Sight sold thousands of solutions throughout the UK, USA and worldwide which wasn’t bad as they had originally budgeted for less than 10 per year.  ISDN became the new standard for file transfer and 4-Sight developed a range of products including ISDN Manager, ISDN Assistant, ISDN Broadcast and laterly Transmission Manager.  Hermstedt also got in on the act with Grand Central Pro among other solutions and Easy Transfer from Sagem.

Then the bubble burst…….along came the Internet!  It was faster and cheaper to maintain and companies started to look for alternatives.  The only limitation was the number of file transfer solutions for the Internet.  FTP became the standard but that’s another topic.

So in a very short time ISDN died a death more or less.  4-Sight was closed in 2003 - prompting us to set up Pro2col - and Hermstedt last year.  ISDN is a great back-up technology now for when customers Internet connections go down and they want an alternative way of transmitting data between two points.  But, it would be fair to say there’s not a great future for ISDN file transfer.

Of course if you still need to support ISDN file transfer the the StingRay file transfer appliance supports it and will continue to support it going foward.

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