On Saturday, October 19, 2002, Dave Brown wrote: Well, they *look* cool. And I think it's unlikely that they can't be hacked to run arbitrary programs. Where are they? -- Jeffrey Sharp

Rumor has it that Dave Brown may have mentioned these words: I don't know a ton about these things, but having spent 3 years as a graphic artist at a printshop, I can definately tell you these are *not* word processors -- they're typesetters. Input was with a keyboard, for sure - but it has a dedicated program using commands similar to today's HTML, but designed for text layout -- to change point size was <PS##>, to change a font was <FT##> & many other commands. [[ the systems I used were the Compugraphic PowerView 10 (mostly) and 5 (sometimes) -- these were special machines running on an 80186 and booted wouldn't wanna see the price!!!) They had up to 1 Meg of RAM, and the OS/Main Program took *most* of it -- I only had about 23K of text/code entry [Methinks the codes were tokenized] and altho there were some very basic looping commands, it wasn't hard to use up whatever stack space was allocated. ]] Output was to special B&W photographic paper, and on the lower end systems the "graphics processor" was a belt or disk with each individual font character on it, which a bright light was shown thru, and lens systems changed the size of each character as needed. These things were *noisy*! (I used the Compugraphic 8016 output unit -- big, noisy ancient behemoth, which you had a maximum of 16 fonts (including line drawing, if you had it) on a mylar disk. I think the metrics were a seperate "barcode" to tell the machine how much room each character took. These disks needed weekly (or more) cleaning, and if you had a light/clear spot on the disk, it had to be fixed or else they were useless... Later in life, I used a [brainfreeze on the model number] output unit that did everything with a CRT to create the characters, lenses to change the size, and fonts & metrics were all on floppy. IIRC, on the later unit, the output was somewhere in the 2400DPI range. (this back when lasers barely made 300dpi, and Canon's bubblejet was just getting up to 180x360 dpi...) HTH, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch(a)30below.com What do you do when Life gives you lemons, and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????

FWIW I've been told that the Compugraphics machines were type setters. It might be a good source of parts. Joe At 08:47 PM 10/19/02 +1300, you wrote: