Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

Employees of Adobe Systems apparently got a jumpstart on the traditional year-end holiday celebrations this year. The company recently feted the troops to a big blowout event to highlight “25 Years of Innovation.” Several Adobe bloggers, including Terry White and Silke Fleischer, chronicled some of the festive proceedings, complete with party pix.

The actual milestones accomplished along the way are also detailed on Adobe.com, including an interactive timeline that outlines the company’s past, including product histories, people and significant events.

In addition, the special online tribute features a Flash-based 25th Anniversary Newsletter with additional information–including embedded video clips–about the company’s innovative accomplishments. (The website mentions that the newsletter can also be downloaded, but if there’s a link to a PDF version, it wasn’t obvious.) For Acrobat and PDF enthusiasts, there’s one video clip that’s worthy of special note.

Once or twice at past industry events, Adobe has shown a short video that purports to be from the pre-PDF era, offering a glimpse of the paper-based document workflow practices and issues in a typical office–particularly those that can be addressed with the company’s 1993 launches. The fictitious employees in the video:

• marvel at the ability to send ascii text (’one doesn’t need bold, just a well-placed exclamation point’) around the world
• brag about having one pair of computers within the organization linked together (’98 percent of interoffice computers can’t communicate’)
• rejoice in being able to deliver urgent files via overnight services
• display an enterprise archiving system — rows and rows of file cabinets — based on a paper-document-based system that a lone, semi-senile employee admitted was ‘logical to him’ (others spent up to three hours a day searching for lost information)
• exchange documents electronically by sending and receiving faxes (when the paper didn’t jam) — many that would end up being copied 19 times

The clip is included in the 25th anniversary newsletter. Definitely worth a look if you’ve never seen it–or even if you have. Acrobat humor is a narrow niche!