An author with whom I have worked since the early 1990’s, called me to talk over revising some of his books ready for reprinting. He was surprised that we still had those old files. What I didn’t tell him was while we had a DiskTracker database listing the CDs they were on, finding the CD itself could prove the problem. After all the years it was one of the many hundreds we have stored. More to the point would be if the files are in any format we could still read.

As it appears from the database, they should be: mainly WordPerfect for Windows, QuarkXPress 3 and Aldus Freehand files. These applications were the best of breed for 1992 and are still available, albeit heavily revised although not with a great deal more features even after a decade of development.

What to do with old data

We’ve been through various formats of data retention, starting with floppy discs capable of holding an 8-page newsletter in their day. Then via internal drives and data compression, to removable external hard discs such as Syquests whose 44MB seemed enormous. Until, that is, we discovered we had over £1000 of cartridges at printers, photo-setters, scanners and with clients. Not a happy situation to be in, luckily early CD writers became affordable around that time. We abandoned Syquests immediately, had a massive burning session to back-up data stored on the cartridges and moved to tiny Zip drives for transporting data up to 100MB per Zip, or CDs which used to take an hour to burn.

Nowadays, CDs are too small and the data they hold capable of being sent electronically. DVDs are little better, one large format book amounts to 35GB of data so we are back to storing on hard drives. With a terabyte of space as little as a couple of hundred quid, our desks are rapidly filling up with Firewire boxes looping together. At least file access is extremely rapid but off-site back-up has become impossible.

Freehand or Illustrator?

Freehand has always been our favourite over Adobe Illustrator, the latter seems limited and awkward in comparison but we have always kept both programs around and current. Sometimes we jump from one to the other, their Postscript files being interchangable, as we did when we created JP233 in CSO Blue for the Tate Gallery. Illustrator just wasn’t up to the job but it’s text control easier than Freehand’s at that point.

Monopoly Lost

The history of Freehand stretches back to 1988 and over four companies. Adobe has owned Freehand twice, once when it bought Aldus in in 1994 and again when it bought Macromedia in 2005. After the first acquisition, it was ruled by a US Federal court that Aldus/Adobe had to hand Freehand back to its developers. This was a company called Altsys who had employed Aldus to market Freehand with whom they had a contract stating they couldn’t market any competing product. The Federal judge said that as Adobe already owned PostScript and Illustrator, they couldn’t have Freehand as well or else they would have a monopoly on the desktop illustration market.

Altsys started to market Freehand and at the same time developed a version to run under NextSTEP, called Altsys Virtuoso. Shortly after, Altsys were bought by Macromedia who continued to develop Freehand from version 4 bought with Altsys, up to version 11, aka Freehand MX. Over this time, Freehand grew to encompass multi-sized documents in the same file, animations and Flash graphics, a superb auto-trace facility and even image manipulation.

In many respects it could become a digital design package to challenge QuarkXPress and Adobe inDesign, at one point it was even marketed as such. Freehand also has the major distinction of being the first major design package to run native on Mac OS X. An operating system which is, in reality, NextSTEP. The original Altsys Virtuoso was based on an old version of NextSTEP and Freehand 4, so this hadn’t enabled the fast transition to OS X. Rather it was the engineers who had programmed it in the first place.

Monopoly regained… for the moment

Now Adobe have regained their monopoly, only time will tell whether they continue to develop Freehand. Apart fro Adobe Illustrator there are alternatives, some of which is very good. Even free Unix openware alternatives running under X11, Apple’s free Unix X Window system that runs as a window in Mac OS X. It’s on the System disks that come with all Macs.

This website http://www.osalt.com, found while writing this blog, lists alternatives for all major software packages on multi platforms.