Unitac first opened its doors for business in 1969 in Rochester, New York. Located on Lake Ontario, an hours drive from Niagara Falls, the new company specialized in stationery printing for the local business community.

As print shops go, there was little to distinguish the young start-up from the dozens of other small offset printers in the area. With one notable exception: it advertised its prices! Unitac's strategy was to sell printing not as a one-of-a-kind job but as a range of pre-defined products. Our reasoning was that an 8½ x 11 letterhead in black ink on white 24# bond was neither easier nor more difficult to produce for ACME Tools than it was for Empire Builders. After a few false starts and some adjustments, what had worked for Henry Ford soon began working for us.

Now I grant you, building cars isn't the same as putting ink on paper . . . Henry didn't have to contend with hundreds of stocks in thousands of colors. But we felt the obstacles were surmountable, and by 1976 Unitac had formulated enough standard products to publish a 40-page price book.

That book was an instant hit with our customers. Not only was it now much easier to order printing - buyers no longer had to ask how much it would cost - it was cheaper, too. Our price book instantly showed the most cost-efficient quantity.

Our booklet so impressed George Griffin, writing at the time for Graphic Arts Monthly, that he devoted his entire column to it in the December 1976 issue.

All that was missing was a computer to generate the prices; recalculating each and every item by hand every year was a time-consuming chore. But missing, for a while at least, it would have to stay, because back then even a "mini" computer would first empty your wallet and then fill an entire floor. In 1976 there were no computer stores, no boxed software, no PC's.

That changed for us in 1978, when a local hobby shop began advertising a home computer in a wooden case that could be bought fully assembled or as a kit. It took us two years to put together that little Horizon, learn Northstar Basic and then write the software, but by July of 1980, Unitac had produced the first computer-generated price list for printing in America! More than a year later, IBM introduced the PC.

There have been many Unitac price books since then. By 1996 the software that drives them had became so powerful that we were able to mail to our customers a do-it-yourself "Electric Catalog and Price List."

In April of 2005 we began making commercial versions of our software available to printers around the world. The first such program was Morning Flight, a free estimating program for small to medium-sized shops, followed by Morning Flight Silver, the boxed edition with expanded features, automated estimate writing, and a printed manual.

If you're a Printer

. . . and you're still doing estimates the old-fashioned way, please don't let Morning Flight's low cost (it's free!) keep you from downloading the program. You're wasting countless hours each week on tedious, unnecessary labor. Hours you could devote instead to caring for your customers and promoting your business.

See what other printers have to say about estimating with Morning Flight. Visit the PrintFire Community Forum.

Unitac International Inc.
15 Anthony Circle
Webster, NY 14580
U.S.A.