Chuck Weger- The man who coined the term "Preflight"

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Graph Expo was an excellent show. As interesting people came by our busy booth, we would interview them. Here we talk with Chuck Weger, the man whom first used the term preflight back in the early 90s, who is today a consultant via his own firm http://www.elara.com/ Transcript David Dilling - D.D.: Great here we are day 2 GrafExpo, the Markzware stand and then along came Chuck Weger. Did I say that correctly? Chuck Weger - C.W.: Yes, you did. D.D.: Very excellent! And he is now with a firm called Elara System Inc. and that is his own company. What do you do Chuck? C.W.: We do workflow consulting, software development, game shows, you name it. D.D.: Great. Excellent! C.W.: Anything that comes along. D.D.: Very good! Now, what many of you might know, many of you might not Chuck is considered the founder of the term Preflighting. Can you tell as a bit of how that happened and what were you doing at that time? C.W.: Well, it was a dark and stormy night. D.D. laughs C.W.: No, it was a conference Ive worked in the prepress industry back in the late 70s early 80s. It was a conference back then called Color Connections, which was all about dealing with all the problems that we had with this new sort of postscript workflow. D.D.: Right. C.W.: And we had a.Sorry. It was the late 80s early 90s. D.D.: Right. Exactly. C.W.: There we go! D.D.: Yeah! C.W.: Wow! Cause I'm very old. Anyway, late 80s early 90s we were having all this problems with postscript. So I gave a paper at a conference called Color Connections; where I said: What we need is something called Postscript Preflight. And its Preflight because what we wanna do, is to check the files before we run them.. Because RIP time was very expensive. You could spend 4 hours running a job only to have the RIP crash. D.D.: Right. I was terrible. C.W.: I was terrible. And so I said: Here is that we need to do the same way that pilots check their plane, they preflight their plane before they take off, so that the plane does not crash. D.D.: Right C.W.: We need to Preflight our files, so the RIP doesn't crash. D.D.: And how was that received at the conference? C.W.: It was a big hit and then I gave the same essential talk at a couple other conferences, and then we had a round table discussion when we talked about: Hmm.. What would a Preflight tool look like? D.D.: Right, right. C.W.: And so its sort of And then I went off to other things, you know professional basketball and stuff. D.D. laughs C.W.: And. D.D.: Chuck just said* (*before the interview) he never played basketball but anyway C.W.: And then, the next thing I know heres Markzware with the Preflight tool. I said: Wow thats pretty cool. D.D.: Yeah, its. sometimes they say: Wouldn't you just think it or say it, its somehow out here, you know. C.W.: Yeah, well, I think thats true. I mean this was before the Internet even so D.D.: Yeah, Markzware was busy with the tool probably around the same time you were talking. C.W.: Yeah. D.D.: So its quite coincidental but it just shows the need in the market for C.W.: Oh, there was a tremendous need and Markzwares product (FlightCheck) filled it, I mean it was a Hmm, I get it. So it was a .. a whole new industry actually. D.D.: Excellent! And what do you like about the show today? Anything that struck you from this Graph Expo 2008? C.W.: Well, being a software guy, I really like the bindery stuff cause its all this little gears and things I dont understand. D.D. laughs C.W.: Thats really cool stuff. D.D.: Cool to see it, yeah. C.W.: Other than that, its a trade show, its good that people are here at all. D.D.: Its busy, isnt it? Its very busy actually, yeah. C.W.: I mean, you know, Adobe hasnt gone under, Markzware hasnt go under, so luckily you guys werent invested, apparently, in the real estate market. So thats good. D.D. laughs D.D.: No, thats right. C.W.: Yeah, its good that people are here, its good to be here at Graph Expo. Graph Expo was always a fun show. D.D.: Excellent! Ok, very good. Well, thank you very much Chuck. Have a great day! C.W.: You're welcome! Read more: http://markzware.com