atex system in Houston

[Toby Thain]

On 2019-03-14 2:21 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Mar 14, 2019, at 2:02 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>
>> Personally, I think it would be really neat if some of these
>> computer museums could collect complete end-product systems
>> and make them run.  Can you imagine showing a bunch of students
>> how a newspaper was produced using a PDP-11 and one of these
>> Tek terminals feeding a real printing press.
>>
>> bill
> 
> I agree it would be really neat.  The odds of pulling it off are slim, unfortunately.  ...
> 
> Phototypesetters of that era were often quite big machines.  At DEC we had an Autologic APS-4, which is a gray box about 6 feet on the sides.  A fair number of customers had its successor the APS-5, which is somewhat smaller but not a whole lot.  The smallest machines I remember were the Mergenthaler Linotron 202, about the size of a large high speed copier.  Later models of that one supported PostScript, I think,

 ...snip...
> 
> And yes, those machines produce output on photographic "film" (paper rolls, actually) which has to be developed and fixed, then cut, coated on the back with sticky wax, and pasted onto layout boards.

Out of high school I worked on a (tiny) family newspaper where we did
that using LaserWriter printouts. Later we bought a Linotronic 100 which
fits your description above: A capstan based laser imagesetter up to
1270dpi which was the first such device to run PostScript, and could be
run over AppleTalk by the Macintosh applications and print manager. I
typeset galleys with it (as it happens, with TeX, using all Adobe
fonts), which were then pasted up into full pages.

The L100 machine itself now needs a forever home. It is stored in Sydney
NSW, Australia, so if anyone _does_ want to preserve some digital
typesetting history, please get in touch.

> 
> The whole production process, from film to layout to press, is quite complex and comes in a bunch of variations.  I understand it slightly, but all that was the province of skilled union tradesmen whose trade has long ago vanished into history.

Yes; my 2nd job was at one of the last old-school graphic repro houses:
Process cameras, manual colour separation and "combining" by the last
generation trained in it. They had a very expensive (pre-PostScript)
Crosfield digital workflow involving drum scanners and high resolution
film recorders which was already obsolete when I started (1992). They
had installed the first PostScript drum imagesetter in Australia (I'm
told) -- a beautifully engineered Scangraphic -- that was my job to run.

--Toby

> 
> And never mind an actual printing press.  Newspaper presses of course are still around, and probably not changed a whole lot.  They are big, loud, and scary.  Watching them switch from a used-up roll of paper to a new full roll, on the fly without stopping, is quite a spectacle.  Especially because it *usually* works -- but if it doesn't it's rather a mess.
> 
> 	paul
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>