What is the most amount of money you've spent on a computer or computer-related item?

[Toby Thain]

On 2017-01-13 5:19 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
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>> On Jan 13, 2017, at 2:02 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>>
>> On 2017-01-13 3:17 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Jan 13, 2017, at 1:05 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> AUD $25,000 for a Linotype L100 PostScript imagesetter (used).
>>>>
>>>> Has a 68K computer inside it with Adobe ROMs. Communication via serial or AppleTalk.
>>>>
>>>> One of the first high resolution PostScript imagesetters. Put a lot of feet of bromide paper through it.
>>>
>>> Neat! By the standards of the time, those were not really high image
>>> quality, but definitely adequate and successful for newspaper work. I
>>> remember working with them in the early 1980s.
>>>
>> Yes, its primary job was newspaper galley setting when I bought it, but I did bureau work on the side. Even some negatives of questionable density ;)
>
> The quality issue I remembered was somewhat jaggy outlines, even
though the scan resolution was entirely adequate. It was the first
outline based typesetter I've seen, and you could tell from the film --

Now I think about it, I've definitely seen what you are talking about, 
although not with this device. Indeed, early outline set fonts were 
insufficiently high resolution. Either they misjudged it or perhaps it 
was due to a memory/storage constraint. Maybe this was a Linotron 
problem, but I'm not familiar with that generation. (IIRC Linotype sold 
the laser/raster engine with its own pre-PostScript software, a 
generation after CRT setters? Or these poor rasterisations might have 
been in the CRT generation.)

This isn't an issue with any of the PostScript setters though 
(specifically not the Linotronics); the PostScript rasterisation is good 
quality. You would never be able to discern flatness issues in the text.

--Toby


but not from newsprint -- that the outline shapes weren't quite fine
enough. It's possible I'm remembering wrong and that was the Linotron
300 that had this issue. Perhaps so, the dates for PostScript don't
quite fit the dates when I was doing this stuff.
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> 	paul
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