Welcome to 2010!

Can you believe we are entering the second decade of the 2000s!?! It seems like just yesterday we were all scrambling to update our computers to avoid the Y2K debacle. Some thought the world was going to end on that New Year’s Day. Others thought that 1/1/00 was actually the end of the 1900s and the new millennium didn’t start until 2001.

I can understand that debate because in the world of publishing LASN is beginning its 26th year in publication. However, in 2010 LASN will celebrate its 25th anniversary!

That’s right, with the upcoming July issue, LASN will hit 25 full years as a magazine. Back in 1985, I was young, single and dumb, but had a full head of hair. Today I am past 50, married with three great kids and have just a little more than nothing springing forth from my head . . . I don’t have much hair either ;-O

Yep, sometimes it seems like yesterday when I was buying the first version of a Mac (400k disc drive with 128k of RAM) with borrowed money to supplement the phone/answering machine and four-drawer file cabinet that comprised the material possessions of LASN.

Back then I bought a “car phone” that had to be installed in the trunk of my car and cabled up to a connected handset that was only slightly smaller than a loaf of bread. That state-of-the-art piece of equipment cost more than $3,500.

That was also about the time that when it absolutely, positively had to be there overnight, you could trust your documents to good old Federal Express. Through FedEx we would ship this huge package of scans and paste up boards to the printer so they could begin the month long process of printing a magazine.

I remember when we got the first generation fax machine that used some kind of weird paper that came in a roll and started to fade within minutes of being “printed.” Still the fax was so cool, because before that you had to wait for the post office or FedEx to deliver any paperwork or contracts.

To scan a photo we used a color separator that had this huge piece of equipment onto which you cut back the Kodak cardboard, then taped each slide to the drum. The machine would spin at outrageous rpms and scan the slides at about 30,000 dpi. When we got our own scanner, everybody said it would never work for magazines! Now, of course, every photo is digital and emailed.

Back then, to change a single letter of text we had to call the typesetter, who would use a green screen monitor and IBM “computer” to activate another huge machine, which would spit out the text on photo paper and run it through a waxer. The wax held the text paper to the paste-up board. Then we got the first generation of Pagemaker (version 1.0) and we could move entire paragraphs with a simple point, click and pull . . .

I’m sure many of you have similar stories about the first time you used autoCAD . . .

Back in 1985, Van Halen had a song with the words, “Nothing stays the same, but change.” Since then, that has been the moniker of LASN.

So now as LASN enters its second quarter century, we are working with new technologies that let us send our entire magazine to the printer with a touch of a button in a time lapse measured by seconds.

Today we are greening the world and using technologies that are truly amazing. But still, 25 years from now you will probably be receiving this magazine on your Kindle (version 40), walking your clients through real-time animated design platforms and getting to and fro in your fully-automated personnel delivery system (we now call them “cars”).

What will be the same? Well, there is a good chance the landscapes you are designing today will still be in place and in use in 2035. But remember, if you use yesterday’s technology today, tomorrow it will be replaced. So be sure to look for tomorrow’s technology today to make sure your landscapes live on into the future . . .

2010 is gearing up to be an amazing year. Keep your eyes on LASN as we are set to begin moving you and this magazine into the next generation . . . More on this next month . . .

God Bless

- George Schmok, Publisher