In 1986, then between his sophomore and junior years at Carnegie Mellon and an intern at Newsweek, Marc Olin came up with the idea to automate the planning of bindery manufacturing for the different magazine versions Newsweek had at the time. “After college, I joined forces with Bob Jones and started ProGraph, using the software application I had written with a couple of classmates as a result of the Newsweek internship,” Olin explains. “We pitched it to what was then Time, Inc., for Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, and People to help them make the magazine production process more efficient. They ended up buying our idea but asked us to run it as a service bureau.”

Back then, in the early 1990s, the process was transmission of the weekly planning files by modem from Time, Inc., to ProGraph, who would create a production plan, and transfer everything to all of the printing firms Time, Inc., was using, including well-known printers of the time such as Quad Graphics, R.R. Donnelley, Perry Printing, and Judds. “We eventually started writing applications to help the printing companies more efficiently use the instructions we were sending them to lay out their production plans,” Olin says.

The natural expansion from that point was the development of other types of applications for printing companies, including scheduling, data collection, and more. After his partner’s passing in the mid-1990s, Olin ran the company solo for a time before partnering with Bill Guttman and combining ProGraph and Proteus.