13 Mar
2019
13 Mar
'19
11:37 a.m.
Paul, what was the timeframe when you worked on the system in Van Nuys?
I worked for a large newspaper starting in 1978 and they made their own 330 seat
Classified Sales Entry system because there wasn't anything out there that was big
enough.
It used Zentec ZMS-90 programmable terminals feeding Series /1 mini's that then fed
IBM 3032 mainframe.
I was wondering if DEC had that system available during that time.
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 13, 2019, at 10:05, Paul Koning <paulkoning
at comcast.net> wrote:
On Mar 13, 2019, at 12:56 PM, Wayne S
<wayne.sudol at hotmail.com> wrote:
Atex, now Newscycle, also had a Classified Advertising system out at that time. I
remember reading a article somewhere saying that Atex was going to use the J11 for that
system.
So did DEC, the "classified management system" (CMS) was part of TMS-11. I
spent some interesting times bug fixing it on site in Van Nuys.
>> On Mar 13, 2019, at 06:41, Toby Thain via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 2019-03-13 9:31 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 12, 2019, at 10:10 PM, Fritz Mueller via cctalk <cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hmmm, are these the atex racks seen lurking in the background of that recent
storage space trawl down near Houston?
>>>
>>>
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-DEC-PDP-11-34-Minicomputer-With-Kennedy-Ta…
>>
>> Interesting. Atex is, or was at one time anyway, a manufacturer of typesetting
systems for newspapers. DEC was also in that business with Typeset-11 (TMS-11) but Atex
was more successful, certainly for smaller newspapers because it used less expensive PDP11
models.
>
> Funny, I always associated it with big papers (I think the NYT used it?)
Could be. Your second reference mentions a max of 200 terminals; I'm pretty sure
TMS-11 couldn't go that high even on a four node cluster (the largest I remember, not
sure if in theory it could go higher).
>> The "multi-processor bus" thing
is curious. And I wonder what the terminals are like. If they are typesetting terminals,
I think they support some sort of WYSIWYG editing setup -- that too was a competitive
advantage vs. the "mark-up" approach (sort of like Runoff on steroids) that
Typeset-11 offered. Looking at the keyboards would give a clue.
>
> Pretty sure Atex was pre-wysiwyg. This article may provide some context
> on that:
>
>
>
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/17/business/can-atex-keep-its-proprietary-p…
>
> &
>
https://books.google.ca/books?id=IAGotP-IDocC&lpg=PA1827&ots=jEwR7s…
That talks about direct to plate, text and graphics. I meant just the text. On the DEC
product, you'd see a typical VT100 style typewriter font display, with line breaks and
hyphenation shown only after you did "send to J&H" to have the line breaks
calculated in a batch process. It wouldn't give you line breaks, or article length
which is important to editors, in real time. I think Atex did provide J&H in real
time. It might still have been typewriter font, so it wouldn't be a display showing
the actual text with the letter shapes as printed, but for a newspaper editor that's
not particularly important.
TMS-11 did support some specialized devices that could do more. There was the classified
page layout system using a Tek 4010 style display (4015? A BIG tube). And there was some
experimental work to extend that to news page layout though there wasn't much interest
in that apparently. And it could drive Harris 2200 terminals which were display ad
creation devices (full graphics WYSIWIG displays) using the ugliest network protocol
I've ever encountered. But the way the system was usually used (1978-1980 when I
worked on it) was that output was generated in single column wide strips of film, which
would then be pasted to page layout boards to produce the finished page layouts.
paul