Comment by goatforce5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goatforce5 | Hacker News Reader

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> I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never seen anything else like it

Sounds like a phototypesetter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting

(I'm probably going to get some terminology wrong here, but...) My mum worked at a regional daily newspaper. They had 2 or 3 phototypesetters in the corner of their computer room. Each one was about the size of 3 full height racks. They'd print on to photographic paper and were designed to be automatically fed in to a machine (about 1.5 full height racks high) from the same manufacturer that would develop the paper, ready for a Compositor (ie, a surly unionized employee) to cover it with hot wax, slice it with a scalpel and physically lay it out on the page. If the printer crashed, it would have to be rebooted with a series of switches to bootstrap it far enough that it could load it's bootloader (?) from paper tape.

Where she worked decided to use a different manufacturer for the printer and the developer such that it wouldn't automatically feed from one to the other. So the printer dumped it's outputs in to boxes mounted on the wall of a darkroom and would wait for someone to go in and manually feed it in to the developer.

It was glorious.

If anyone ever gets the chance to go on an open-day or tour of the noisy end of a newspaper or large print shop, i'd totally recommend it.

"Sounds like a phototypesetter:"

You are correct. I owned one type - Itek Quadritek (another was Compugraphic). The fonts were essentially plastic disks. At the time (early 80's) each font was $40 (80's) dollars.

I later (about '86 iirc) replaced this with a Linotronic which was driven by not only a green screen front end (as described) but later the first Mac 128k (I think Pmaker 1.0 required 512k mac). The lino was $80,000 in 80's dollars approx iirc.

"Sounds like a phototypesetter:"

Wanted to add that to this day I can still remember the sound of the stepper motors spinning and manipulating the plastic font disks. A really cool sound. (Similar in a way to modem negotiation but lasting much longer obviously).

On those machines for anyone not familiar you actually had to write code (mark point, return point) in order to draw a simple box. Then more code for the actual type. Everything was placed by coordinates.

So when (even) mac paint was released and you could draw a box and put type inside of it the potential seemed quite obviously. It also added greatly to creativity because a designer could work in real time coming up with a design.

Even more fun was the Compugraphic Junior. It didn't use disks, but film strips with the font. Then your had to switch out some gears to change the font size.

Seemed pretty futuristic at the time though.

Some of this sounds familiar. The Berthold unit in your link looks like the same general family of technology...everything is recognizable (the Linotype photo doesn't look familiar in style at all). But from what I remember their setup was maybe a couple steps more modern. Nothing so big to be rack sized.

The green screen bit was your typical 1980s CRT green on black terminal with two 5 1/4" floppy drives vertically mounted next to the screen. The connected rendering monitor was a vertical format...the screen was maybe 17"? And the photoprinter was maybe the size of a large color laser printer today. I think all the reservoirs were semi-internally mounted and I think the width of the printout wasn't even 8 1/2". It was really suited just for blocks of text to be later hand pasted up.

There was no place for the printouts to go, so for a while they just dumped on the floor until somebody nailed an extra empty paper shipping box underneath to catch them.

I don't remember there being any other pieces of hardware, but again, I'm going back through the haze of a few decades here and I didn't personally work on the equipment.

after a little looking

The closest I can find is this http://macpro.freeshell.org/quadritek/Digitek.html

I know that they went through at least 2 or 3 generations of these before switching to digital desktop publishing, I think my memories are mostly of their last system. So the previous ones could have been more like the other ones being described here.

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