atex system in Houston

[Paul Koning]

> 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-Tape-Drive-J11-CPU-2-Terminals/123688125244
>>> 
>>> 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-place-in-the-newsroom.html
>> 
>> &
>> https://books.google.ca/books?id=IAGotP-IDocC&lpg=PA1827&ots=jEwR7s7dWM&dq=atex%20customers%201970s&pg=PA1827#v=onepage&q=atex%20customers%201970s&f=false

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