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Old Phototypesetter Tales

Credits -
This
document
was created by Clark E. Coffee, who founded and operated Graphion, a
phototypesetting
company in San Francisco, that pioneered many computerized typesetting
techniques.
I was involved in some of these developments. Clark sold the business
in 2000
and retired. I have included his document with a few minor
updates in
my web site because of its historical
interest.
Contents
The past thirty years have seen the rise and fall of an
industry
and a trade, called "phototypesetting". As it grew, it replaced the
lead
type that had been around since the Renaissance with generated
automatic
systems. It now has virtually died, as small inexpensive computers and
"desktop
publishing" have replaced the old skills.
Having ridden this technological wave this far, it seems
worthwhile
to preserve a little of the history, gossip, and individuals who made
it happen.
Most of what we'll write is from imperfect recollections, which we'll
be
happy to correct when errors are called to our attention. We'll check
our
stories, when we can, but in this case it's true that "history is old
gossip,"
so don't take this work as a final authority.
Our knowledge is limited to the developments in the
United
States, though we've heard of a machine developed by Nobuo Morisawa, in
Japan that used many of the features later used in Europe and the US as
early
as the mid 1920s. The Morisawa Co., and an off-shoot Sha-Ken, still
manufacture
typesetting equipment in that country. We are accumulating information
regarding
early developments in France and Germany which we'll add when we can.
There has always been a problem with the words
"typesetter"
and "phototypesetter" which can mean either a machine, or a person.
We'll
capitalize them when we mean a person in this work.
First a Word about the People We Replaced
Typesetting as a skilled trade originated in the
renaissance.
The Typesetter was solely responsible for the appearance of every page.
The wonderful vagaries of hyphenation, particularly in the English
language,
were entirely in the Typesetter's control (for example, the word
"present"
as a noun hyphenates differently than the same word as a verb). Every
special
feature: dropped capitals, hyphenation, accented characters,
mathematical
formulas and equations, rules, tables, indents, footnotes, running
heads,
ligatures, etc. depended on the skill and esthetic judgment of the
Typesetter.
Such was the attention to detail and pride in the
appearance
of a well composed page that Typesetters would occasionally rewrite
bits
of text to improve the appearance of the page. This greatly annoyed
Mark Twain
(who began his own career as a Typesetter) and encouraged him to invest
heavily
in an early, and unsuccessful, attempt to produce a keyboard-driven
typesetting
machine that wouldn't edit his words.
There was a romantic tradition, in this country at
least,
of the drifter Typesetters, who were good enough at the craft to find
work
wherever they traveled. They'd work in one town until they wanted a
change
and then drift on. They had a reputation for being well read,
occasionally
hard drinking, strong union men who enjoyed an independence
particularly
rare in the 19th century.
Typesetting was a skilled and respected trade even after
the
keyboard-driven typesetting machines were introduced, around 1900.
These machines
typically produced lead strips for each line of type, which were
stacked
in a frame, proofed (the type was of course backward), and clamped into
columns
or pages. Extra space between lines was supplied with thin strips of
lead,
inserted between lines. Pages such as price lists and directories would
be
kept in "standing type" and edited by adding and removing individual
lines
of type. Large type in headings, etc., was likely to be set by hand and
combined
with the machine set lines. The International Printing Museum in
Carson, CA. https://www.printmuseum.org/
has some of the
antique hot lead machines on display.
The I.T.U.
The International Typographical Union, was described as,
"the
oldest union in America, and organized to prevent the use of labor
saving
improvements." The union fought hard for its members and when times
were
hard would send money and train fare to unemployed Typesetters, and
direct
them to places where prospects were better.
When preset advertising copy began to be provided by
advertisers,
in the late nineteenth century, the union required that this type could
be used as received only if a union Typesetter was employed to reset,
print,
proof, and throw away the same copy. The union leader who negotiated
this
requirement is reported to have been a Mr. Bogus, and this redundant
make-work
typesetting was called "bogus" type and added a word to the language.
(There
are other explanations for the word, but none that we know of
contradicts
this one).
Even as late as the 1980s, most type was set on lead
casting
machines, and the production manager at the San Jose News
complained
that his reporters' stories were being retyped by "400-dollar a month
secretaries
who type 80 words a minute and don't make mistakes, and then retyped at
40
words a minute on Linotype machines by 800-dollar a month Typesetters
who do make mistakes."
In the 1970s when the machines that set type began to
use
low cost mini, and later microcomputers that automated the old
typesetting
skills, the need for the ITU members began to decline. One after
another,
newspapers that were already losing advertising dollars to the new
upstart
television were hit by ITU strikes called to prevent the loss of jobs
for
Typesetters. One by one these papers closed their doors forever, and
Typesetters
were really put out of work. Finally the union had to settle for
agreements
that said basically, "you can't fire our people, but you can give them
any
kind of honest work you have available." Since these Typesetters had an
average
age of over 50 years, the papers could use them for anything from
driving
trucks to managing the paper warehouse, and they'd all be gone,
replaced by
people with lower wages (if inflation didn't make the wages equal)
within
10 or 15 years.
A sad 49 year old Typesetter told me in 1978, "My Daddy
always
told me 'get a trade', so I did my apprenticeship and became a
Typesetter!
Now I'm unemployable!"
The ITU no longer exists as an independent union. It had
a
long proud history,protecting and getting good wages for its members
through
some very hard times for trade workers. We'd be well advised to realize
that
most of the jobs we do so well now will probably go away or change
completely
in a single life time, and when you reach the age of the Typesetter
quoted
above, you probably won't have a union working to protect your right to
work.
So stay up to date!
Lewis Mumford tells us that the guild of scribes and
copyist,
delayed the introduction of printing presses into Paris for as much as
twenty
years. In this century people and machines become obsolete almost over
night.
Absitomen
See the story of one paper that survived.
The Rise and Fall of Phototypesetting
Machines
How It Came About
There were phototypesetting devices of one kind or
another,
including one patented in Japan by Nobuo Morisawa in 1925, but the
revolution,
or evolution, that would change the entire process of getting words
into
print twice in the last quarter of the twentieth century, was brought
about
by four forces:
- The improvement
in Lithographic printing presses, and photographically produced litho
plates,
and the introduction of photographically produced plastic plates
replacing
lead for letter-press printing equipment.
- The development of
phototypesetting
machines.
- The
computer
automation of typesetting and the whole page make-up process.
- Increasing environmental sensitivity, that frowns on
dumping
metal etching solutions or even photographic solutions into the public
drains.
Photon Begins It All
In this country it really began
shortly
after the end of World War II when two Frenchmen, Higonnet and Moyrou,
developed
a viable phototypesetter that used a strobe light and a series of
optics to
project characters from a spinning disk onto photographic paper. They
licensed
their patents to a Massachusetts firm called Photon, which began
producing
a series of very expensive phototypesetting machines in 1945. Photon
grew
to be a major firm, with sales and service offices all over the country.
The machines made by Photon, and the
competitors
who began to appear, were operated by punched paper tape produced on
special
"perforators," that had been used for some lead casting machines since
1932.
The paper tape used a 6-level code called TTS. Because you can only
represent
about 36 different characters in six bits, it had to use shift,
super-shift,
and "bell" characters to get upper and lower case alphabets, numerics,
punctuation
and special characters. They had large keyboards with all of the
special typesetting
commands like "quads", em-space, en-space, en-dash, em-dash, open and
close
double and single quotes, and some pi characters like bullets and
stars.
At first the skill required to prepare these tapes was little changed
from
the lead casting machines; the operator controlled the line breaks,
based
on line lengths shown on a line width counter and his knowledge of
hyphenation
rules and conventions.
The First Automated Typesetting
In the 1960s when the term
"computer"
described a large air-conditioned room full of big machines, probably
from
IBM, RCA, Burroughs, Univac, or DEC (where have all the flowers gone?),
typesetting
began to be automated. RCA offered a CRT based machine, called a
"VideoComp,"
made in Germany by Hell (now a merged with Linotype), which inspired
IBM to
fund the development of the IBM 2680, a CRT-based machine, made for IBM
by
a Long Island company called Alphanumeric Inc. (Alphanumeric had
pioneered
a digital phototypsetter operated by a small DEC computer/controller).
Both
the RCA and IBM typesetters were remarkable machines, but the computers
necessary
to run them leased for thousands of dollars per month, which kept their
market
relatively small. These machines disappeared because small cheap
computers
to drive them didn't begin to appear until the early 1970s. The 2680
was the
basis for the first Autologic, which contained a minicomputer,
replacing the
big IBM equipment, but it didn't appear until much later.
Compugraphic
In the late 1960s Mergenthaler was
purchasing
perforator terminals to drive its lead casting Linotype machines, from
a
Massachusetts company named Compugraphic. This led to a new
development...
At this time Photon was the leading, if not the only, phototypesetter
manufacturer;
its president was a man named Bill Garth. He wanted to produce a small,
inexpensive
typesetting machine, but his board of directors preferred more
glamorous large,
expensive machines. Garth left Photon and moved to Compugraphic, a much
smaller
company only a short distance down the road. At Compugraphic he
arranged
to buy back from Mergenthaler the rights to the machine that
Compugraphic
had been making for them, which had been developed at Mergenthaler's
expense.
Then he used the keyboards, logic, and hardware to directly drive a
small
integral phototypesetter. These machines took up less room than the old
hot
type machines and were, I believe, the first inexpensive typesetting
machines
that could be said to run "on line," allowing justified type with
several
different fonts, and special characters without any paper tape
punching. They
weren't very versatile, didn't allow a lot of fonts at one time, and
didn't
set very wide columns, but then the hot type machines they replaced
were
even less clever. Best of all, they didn't worry the ITU because they
simply
replaced the hot type machines without reducing the number of operators.
In only a few years Compugraphic was
doubling
in size every year. It is said that at a large typesetting show, Garth
pulled
a chair over across from the Photon booth, where the salesmen were
standing
around watching the stream of people pouring in and out of the
Compugraphic
booth. He sat there smiling, entertaining his friends, and making
Photon's
management miserable.
This was of course noticed by Harris
Intertype,
Mergenthaler, and Monotype, who had been the foremost makers of the
lead
casting type machines for 60 or 70 years. They set about making their
own
phototypesetting machines, when Photon showed the way.
Harris Intertype
The Harris phototypesetter, called a
TXT,
was about eight feet long, four feet wide, and six feet tall. The fonts
were on a half dozen platter-sized glass plates spinning at high speed
at
the ends of radial arms that rotated around when a type face change was
called
for. These monsters were used by newspapers well into the 1980s.
Mergenthaler Linotype
Mergenthaler's first
phototypesetter,
the Linofilm, came out in 1954, but by 1970 they produced a
phototypesetter
called the VIP which held six fonts at a time (one reserved for
punctuation
and special characters like the asterisk, etc.), and selected sizes
from
5 to 35 points with a moving zoom lens. (Special font strips could be
used
to set type from 35 to 72 points.) It would set a page of type in about
four
minutes. The type fonts for the VIP were on film strips a little larger
than
a business card, and cost hundreds of dollars each. They were not
priced as
families of light, medium, italic, bold, & bold italic; such a list
would
require five separate purchases. Phototypesetters nearly always had
well
equipped dark rooms, and a special punch was soon on the market to
duplicate
the registration holes in the original font strips, so that anyone
could make
copies of these fonts. Since they could be easily damaged in cleaning,
and
frequent changing, it was a good idea to keep a copy or two as backup
even
if you had only one VIP.
But then a company named "Storch,"
started
offering font strips for the VIP at very low prices. Mergenthaler of
course
filed suit, and dropped its prices. The font prices went from $100 or
$200
to $30 or $40. These affordable fonts made the VIP the dominant
electromechanical
phototypesetter, and was probably the best thing that ever happened to
Mergenthaler.
The VIP was followed by a hybrid machine, the 408, which used an image
tube
to scan the characters on a film master, and a CRT to place them on the
output
copy. It found considerable use in newspapers. The 202 family (about
1980)
were truly digital typesetters with fonts stored as digital data in
memory,
in its minicomputer controller (marketed as the Naked Mini) or on a
disk drive.
The firm introduced the concept of the "imagesetter" with its 300 in
about
1985, recognizing the change from "typesetting" to "graphics." That
machine's
descendants are still a dominant output source in 1995.
Having carried its founder's name
for
about 80 years, Mergenthaler changed its name briefly to "Allied,"
which
most people thought was a moving company, then quickly changed it again
to
the name of Ottmar Mergenthaler's 19th century type casting machine,
the
"Linotype." More recently it has combined with the German firm Hell, as
Linotype
Hell.
Singer/GSI
Others had noticed the sudden growth
in
the typesetting equipment market. One was Singer Corp. which set up a
national
sales force for typesetting and graphic arts equipment, including the
phototypesetting
machines made by another Massachusetts company, Graphic Systems Inc.
These
machines had a brief but spectacular run in the 1970s until someone at
Singer
asked what they were doing in the typesetting equipment business (which
they
knew nothing about), so little GSI was left to its own devices with no
marketing
organization. Singer had been responsible for providing the type font
masters
and the machines were getting a reputation for poor base line
regularity.
This may have been a hardware problem because strobe timing errors
showed
up as base line errors on the GSI machines, while on the Mergenthaler
VIP
such errors showed up between the characters, and unless fairly
serious, escaped
notice. GSI began producing excellent font masters and the machines
continued
to find a market. They built a minicomputer into the machine (a Nova),
making
it capable of setting justified, hyphenated type from a pure text input
using
a particularly convenient coding system that owed nothing to old
Linotype
practices. It allowed stored formats, or in-line codes. These machines
held
four fonts at a time, but had more characters per font than the VIP, so
that
the asterisks and other common characters were included. They used a
rotating
turret of lenses and a second "doubler lens" to offer a range of sizes
from
5 to 72 points. The GSI machines were particularly popular with the
in-house
typesetting departments that began to grow in most larger companies.
(Graphion's
first typesetter was a GSI we called Beverly, in honor of Beverly
Sills,
because it was a Singer. We used Beverly for several years before
moving
on to the next generation machines, and parted with her sadly).
Who Owns the Typefaces
There was a wonderful period in the
late
1970s when most of the important typefaces where owned by, or under
exclusive
license to, Harris Intertype, Mergenthaler, and Monotype, so the
growing new
companies simply copied these fonts and renamed them. Phototypesetters
like
ourselves had to keep conversion lists so they'd know when a customer
asked
for "Toms Roman," he'd been dealing with a Compugraphic system. The
same
type would be called "London" on a GSI or Singer machine, or "Times
Roman"
on a Mergenthaler. The fonts were about as similar as anyone could make
them,
but the serif on the descender of a letter like Q might be longer or
shorter,
to justify this outright theft of type styles by claiming that they
were
unique new faces.
The End of Photon
By the late 1970s, Photon was seeing
its
markets erode. According to the book, Words Into Type,
(Prentice
Hall 1974) "by 1972 over 100 machines to set type photographically were
on
the market". Photon responded by launching a crash program to develop a
low
cost machine to be called the Pacesetter and by entering into an
agreement
to market as a Photon 7000, the new CRT machine being developed by
Autologic,
in California.
The Pacesetter was a very fine
electro-mechanical
machine, potentially a major threat to the Mergenthaler and Singer
machines.
But its crash program was a very expensive way to develop anything. The
machines were late coming out. In desperation, some were shipped as
late
as the end of January 1974 with December packing slips so the sales
could
be credited to the last quarter of 1973. One technician described them
as
"going out with wires hanging out of them." The local sales and
servicing
offices were promptly swamped with problems that should have been
solved
at the factory. There weren't any spare parts, so they'd cannibalize
the
first machines rejected by angry buyers, to try to keep, or get, the
others
running. Within the year Photon had closed its doors. But some of the
Pacesetters
had long, useful lives.
Autologic
It had become obvious to
Alphanumeric,
in 1969, that the IBM mainframe hardware requirements to operate their
typesetter,
called the IBM 2680, were going to keep their sales volume very low.
Alphanumeric
had become its own best customer, operating its machines on a service
bureau
basis in a number of major cities. The company decided to spin off the
typesetter
development to a new corporate shell, and replace the big IBM systems
with
a minicomputer controller. To do this they bought a small San Francisco
company
called Autologic, which was in the process of developing a Computer
Aided
Design system having nothing in particular to do with typesetters but
offered
a clean corporate shell. After long and arduous negotiations with a variety of potential investors, a
major share of the company was sold to Volt Inc. The typesetter development was moved
from
Long Island to Southern California, and the CAD activities, after a few
sales, were phased out.
Which brings us to the Autologic
machines.
These fast, wide-output machines were first offered through Photon as
the
Photon 7000, the numbers being the last digits of Photon's office phone
number.
The combination of new product start-up problems, and the growing
corporate
sickness at Photon doomed that agreement. The Autologic machines
continued
after the demise of Photon and carved a major place in the market for
newspaper
production, a field it dominated. From the beginning these have been
100-pica
wide machines (16 and 2/3 inches), allowing them to set an entire
newspaper
page in one pass with no need for paste-up, and the type was of very
high
quality. It is reported that, by mid 1995, Autologic no longer produces
any
hardware, but continues to market its newspaper pagination software.
In
2002 Autologic was bought by Agfa Gevaert.
There were Others
As we've mentioned, "by 1972 over
100
machines to set type photographically were on the market," including
Harris
Intertype, GSI, Monotype, Friden, Mergenthaler, and Photon, so we've
only
skimmed the surface here. We need stories about some of the other
players,
and would welcome input from anyone interested. Please direct
emails
to dan@haagens.com
Tapelim -- A
Footnote
An interface device called a Tapelim
was
produced by Graphion in 1974 (yes, that's us, we built it for our own
use,
then continued to make and ship them in various forms for about 15
years).
The Tapelim looked to a computer like a serial device such as a modem,
and
replaced the paper tape reader in the typesetter. This allowed the GSI,
Mergenthaler,
and Harris Intertype machines to be operated directly by the
minicomputers
that had started appearing about 1971, and later by a variety of
microcomputers
from CPM to PCs. Interestingly enough, the Mergenthaler 202 series of
machines
which introduced true digital CRT typesetting were first marketed as
paper
tape-driven machines, although a number of on-line interfaces were
later added.
The Tapelim was being sold for use on these machines as late as 1990,
in
conjunction with a program, created by Jeremy Griffith, which would
convert
Ventura Publisher page descriptions to the 202's language, called CORA.
Front End Systems
Without a computer to drive them,
phototypesetters
are just like the old linotype machines except that they produce paper
instead
of lead. But, with a computer, all of the old Typesetters' decisions
can be
programmed. We can kern characters with abandon, dictionaries and
programs
can make nearly all hyphenations correctly, lines and columns can be
justified,
and special effects like dropped capitals become routine. The type data
itself
can be part of or used by: billing programs (classified ads),
membership records
(directories), hardcover books and pocket books, etc. It was the
development
of these programs and the appearance of low cost computers that began
the
change to today's desktop systems.
By the early 1970s, there were
systems
being developed by firms like DEC, Bedford, Information Systems Inc.,
and
in-house developers like ourselves, that would provide automatic
hyphenation
and pagination using the minicomputers that had just become available.
At
the time they seemed cheap compared to renting time on IBM machines at
between
$50.00 and $150.00 dollars per hour. However, the first Graphion
computer,
a superior 16-bit machine which we called RALPH, cost about $200,000 in
1970,
with the total software development costing as much again. We acquired
it
at a bargain price of about $180,000 in 1972. (By way of comparison,
this
was about the time we bought our house in San Francisco for $25,000).
We now
have a room full of PCs, any one of which is more powerful than that
first
machine, and they cost about $2,000 each. We were fond of Ralph, but
sadly
sent him to the landfill many years ago.
Phototypesetting
R.I.P.
The development of WYSIWYG systems
(What
You See Is What You Get) began in the 1980s with a variety of
proprietary
systems, most of which settled for as little as two screen fonts, one
serif
and one sans-serif. It wasn't until the Adobe output description
language
called PostScript became an industry standard, that output machines and
input
systems could begin to offer the generalized "Desktop Publishing
Systems."
These were first offered for in-house newsletters etc., but have
continued
to mature with many of the automated typesetting features that had only
been
available in such systems as the Bedford, Information Systems
(developed by
Fred Rose), and our own.
Photographic output for type is now
challenged
by high resolution laser devices that double in resolution every year
or
two. Reasonable type has been available at 1000 dpi for several years,
but
some firms offer up to 2400 dpi in mid 1995. Some use laser printer
engines
like the Cannon, or Toshiba, that began life as low resolution computer
print
out devices, but we will surely see this technology making printing
plates
in the near future. The prospect of getting away from the whole silver
halide
process has to appeal to anyone who has maintained photo processing
machines,
and contributed a dollar per page to Kodak profits for any time at all.
The
prices for these machines is so low we can afford to buy them expecting
to
replace them with better machines in one or two years, just like the
computers
we use to drive them.
We purchased a LaserMaster 1000 dpi
machine
in 1990, when it offered PostScript compatibility, and wrote our own
PostScript
driver program to utilize our system's output. When we started
producing
copy, however, we found voids appearing in the type. After rejecting
every
toner offered by LaserMaster, we learned that HP model III toner
produced
type on the LM 1000 without voids. The output compared with our three
Linotype
202s. As a result, those great expensive machines were given away, or
sent
to the land-fill, along with our second Oscar Fisher processor. Our
customers
prefer the plain paper output, particularly for proofing, because it is
much easier to write on than RC paper phototypesetter output.
We have more recently tried an 1800
dpi
Laser Master machine, and a 1200 dpi Xante machine. Both left voids in
the
type when using LaserPlus paper from Hammermill, which was delivered
with
the machines, and had worked for two years with our LM1000-HPIII-toner
combination.
These machines use Toshiba and Cannon engines respectively. We have
found
no other source for toner for these machines. At the present state of
the
art, it is possible to reduce to insignificance the tendency to leave
voids
by using a very good bond paper, which has a slightly rougher surface.
We
are presently putting out most of our work on the Xante with Neutech 25
(25%
cotton) laser paper. No one has asked us for film, but we know that
it's possible.
These machines seem to offer
reasonably
good half-tone capabilities, and LaserMaster is offering products for
color
separations and proofing, but our particular business niche has little
requirement
for graphics. Other high resolution lasers are offered by LexMark,
NewGen,
XLI, Dataproducts and probably others we don't know about.
The toner/paper problem does not
appear
to have been solved in a very satisfactory way on the two machines
we've
tried, but those of us who remember how long it took the photographic
paper
suppliers to achieve real consistency, or had to live with
"stabilization
paper" that faded within days, are not discouraged. We can produce
acceptable
type, and we've been able to give up our downtown office and move into
our
own "electronic cottage," while producing more pages than was ever
before
possible.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The Graphion system was begun in
1972,
on a minicomputer driving an electro-mechanical typesetter made by GSI.
Much has changed since then. We moved to a system called TurboDos, sold
a
few systems to friends, and drove a whole series of different
typesetters,
including our last, a series of three Mergenthaler/Linotype 202s. The
Graphion
system is still alive and moving with the times, running on IBM clones
since
1993 and outputting PostScript code to drive imagesetters, laser
printers,
or platemakers. Since we're dealing in text rather than advertising we
still
don't offer color, but will when it's required.
We entered the phototypesetting
field
when it was just beginning, and we've seen it through to the end. We
can
see no reason to expect that it won't end for everyone very soon. As
laser
printers continue to increase their resolution there will be no need
for
photographic processing at all. In fact, we will increasingly be
producing
only data to run plate-making, or direct input printing machines.
Proofing
will be on CRTs and our output will be sent out by modem. In some cases
the
copy will appear on paper only when it's downloaded by a user for some
reason,
which may save a lot of trees. Unless this "post literate society"
becomes
an "illiterate society" there will continue to be a market for our
services
for a long while to come.
The new desktop systems have put
great
power in the hands of some aesthetically challenged operators who can
and
sometimes do produce type that is just plain ugly, but it isn't the
fault
of the computer systems. Even as the phototypesetters, after a slow
start,
ultimately produced better type than the lead type systems, we expect
continuing
improvement. For now, we miss the aesthetic sense that professional
Typesetters
brought to their craft, but it's progress that no one wants to stop.
New Information
We've heard recently (July 18, 1995)
from
Brian W. Case (bcase@mail.best.com) that he is using a DEC 5100 laser
printer
with an upgrade board for 1200 DPI. It's a letter/legal size machine
available
for $999 for the machine, and $350 for the upgrade. As with most other
machines
full page graphics may require additional memory, but text does not. He
sounds
quite knowledgable and very pleased with the output which he feels is
better
than the Laser Master or the Xante. It's giving him good solid type
without
voids or pinholes, on Hammermills Laser-Plus.
We've seen sample copy from this
machine
(August 18, 1995) and its output is definitely superior to our 1200 DPI
Xante, no voids, and on Laser-Print paper, which we can't use on the
Xante
or the 1800 DPI LaserMaster. His DEC costs about $5,000 less than
either
of them!!!!
"Oh well...It's only money!"
A Successful Change
to
Phototypesetting
A small suburban newspaper called
The
San Rafael Independent Journal, generally known as the IJ, under the
management
of Norman Jaffe, was a pioneer in the change over from the "hot-type"
typesetters
and into the new automation. They made the decision to move to a
Mergenthaler
408 phototypesetter to be driven by a small IBM computer, in about
1969. They
expected to retrain their ITU typesetters, some of whom had been with
them
for many years. Unfortunately, they got into a dispute with the union,
which
called a strike. The IJ was far enough along, when the strike began, to
bring
in what they called "ex-legal secretaries, the best typists in the
world"
and teach them to run their terminals, which by this time were actually
modified
electric typewriters.
The strike was bitter, tires were
slashed,
trucks were sabotaged, and finally one IJ man was killed. The murder
caused
everyone to fall back, and the union eventually dropped the strike,
with no
concessions from management. The IJ, because they were ahead of most
firms,
could boast that they went to phototypesetting when their hot type
machines
could still be sold for money.
At one time visitors from all over
the
world would come to San Rafael (just north of San Francisco) to monitor
the progress at the IJ. With the leadership of Jerry Fingerlos, the
technical
manager, the IJ developed or helped fund the development of software
that
would set entire pages of classified advertising automatically, and
also would
prepare the billing for each advertiser. The input was provided by the
person
who took the order. The IJ continued using their letter press printing
presses,
but switched to new photographically produced plastic printing plates.
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