Yep. I first realized this in the '80s when I was working in FileMaker Plus (from Nashoba at the time) to import data and print out bulk mail. FMP was WYSIWYG -- easy layout tools, and I could make anything I wanted happen in seconds with a ~$2800 Mac 512k and a ~$7000 laserwriter.
One time we had a job that required a high-speed printer, so we went to a copy shop. They had a ~$300K Xerox printer that was the size of three washing machines side by side. It could print something like 20-30 pages per minute compared to the laserwriter's 2(?).
And the Xerox had something like a 4-inch amber-and-black display, and the guy setting up the job was putting in parameters by hand, almost like writing code to do the layout. He spent a minute doing that, hit the button, the machine spun up, and then BOOM, out came a page. And the layout was wrong.
He spent 20 minutes getting the layout right, through maybe 10 iterations of write code, spit out a copy, see that it was wrong.
And that's when it hit me: with a machine that expensive, you want it working non-stop. Time spent on setup is time wasted, clearly. And yet no one at Xerox was thinking about that, obviously, because that thing couldn't have wasted more of its time on setup if they'd tried.
And on the other hand, the (relatively) cheap Mac+LaserWriter had WYSIWYG and was ready the first time, every time. It was insane the difference between the two.
One time we had a job that required a high-speed printer, so we went to a copy shop. They had a ~$300K Xerox printer that was the size of three washing machines side by side. It could print something like 20-30 pages per minute compared to the laserwriter's 2(?).
And the Xerox had something like a 4-inch amber-and-black display, and the guy setting up the job was putting in parameters by hand, almost like writing code to do the layout. He spent a minute doing that, hit the button, the machine spun up, and then BOOM, out came a page. And the layout was wrong.
He spent 20 minutes getting the layout right, through maybe 10 iterations of write code, spit out a copy, see that it was wrong.
And that's when it hit me: with a machine that expensive, you want it working non-stop. Time spent on setup is time wasted, clearly. And yet no one at Xerox was thinking about that, obviously, because that thing couldn't have wasted more of its time on setup if they'd tried.
And on the other hand, the (relatively) cheap Mac+LaserWriter had WYSIWYG and was ready the first time, every time. It was insane the difference between the two.