Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style | Hacker News Reader

Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style

commfaculty.fullerton.edu

88 pointsmattbierner18 comments

I guess this is one generation before my own experience, I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s with CompuGraphic 7500 machines[1].

This is an integrated unit that accepts the keyboard input, shows the marked-up input on the display (not WSYWIG, of course, but you can see the layout commands and check the spelling), can save and load files onto 8-inch floppies (to the left of the screen), and uses the same photo-typesetting scheme that's described in the article to produce the actual output, the big box to the left of the screen/keyboard contains a drum with filmstrips on it, and has the strobe system that flashes the letters one at a time onto photosensitive paper that gets fed into a light-tight cassette that you pull out of the little door there and then run through a developer/fixer machine.

The CG 7500 could load two font families at a time (one on each of two filmstrips), and could mix and match font sizes, also, which sounds like it's also an advance over the 2961 unit in the article.

This was in a graphic-arts company mostly focused on advertising, although we also did a bit of legal work from time to time. We occasionally had rush orders, but we didn't have the constant relentless deadline pressure that newspapers have.

[1] http://www.forgottenartsupplies.com/?what=artifacts&image_id...

I grew up in a family printing business and remember machines much more like the CompuGraphic 7500 in their production process than what's here. By that point they loaded off of 5.25" floppies (two drives IIR) and had two screens, a green command screen and a vertical preview screen that could render a font or two and some text before committing it to photographic paper printout. They kept it until well into the late 90s even though they had generally moved on to a PC-based workflow in prepress much earlier. Doing odd typesetting jobs when their department guy was out was how I got my start in computers.

The next page on the site showing the platemaking process is also incredibly familiar: http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/woverbeck/dtr6.htm

I can still smell and feel the industrial soap they used to get to wash up after prepping the plates.

There's a lot of work that's gone into preserving early printing, but I think that this era really deserves some more love as well. So many creative ideas went into the process that gave us cheap consumer ready mass printing.

Somewhat related - there's a good documentary about the last edition of the New York Times published using the linotype process called "Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU

The end of the video - from 1978 - shows a bunch of people tapping away at CRT terminals. If you think about the fact that the first terminal like that was launched in 1969, and the first integrated microprocessor just a few years later, it took less than a decade for those monster linotype machines to go from the standard for printing, to so-much scrap metal. It's a pretty rapid change, which got even faster just 6 years later with the introduction of the Mac and "Desktop Publishing". I studied this stuff in 1990 and I might as well have learned all about making wooden horse cart wheels as the Web took over soon after. Crazy pace of change...

I was two cohorts later and Quark just got killed by PageMaker then Freehand which got killed by InDesign and Illustrator. But I also learnt Authorware that got killed by Director that got killed by Flash. Then I learnt Hotdog, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, ASP, PHP...

Can we just settle on a standard already? (Now learning Sketch and ReactJS and Clojure)

TeX is still TeX!

That was fascinating, thank you! I really appreciated the factual, no-nonsense documentary approach. So many current documentaries have annoyingly intrusive presenters and fill their runtime up with irrelevant aesthetic shots. (An honorable recent exception: Netflix's Dirty Money, which was produced by Alex Gibney, whose style I like a lot.)

A similar video is: Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production.

Trailer et al: https://vimeo.com/user11373350 ; http://www.graphicmeans.com/ ; old kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/graphicmeans/graphic-me... .

I enjoyed the MIT screening. It looks like non-institutional purchase isn't available yet.

I worked for a small town newspaper in the early 90’s. We used Macs and a laser printer to print out the main articles in column format. We had a headline printer like the one they describe. We would then wax up the articles and headlines, and cut and paste them onto the layout board. The layout board was then photographed and turned into a 1:1 photo negative. We left room for photos, which were processed separately and taped into place on the negatives. The completed negatives were combined into two-page sheets and used to expose printing plates.

We would start the compositing process around 10AM on press days, and newspapers would be coming off the presses by around 2:00.

In the '90s I worked for a weekly paper with a similar process, layout in Quark, then final pasteup on boards. Before that, I worked for a magazine with a Compugraphic typesetter, but by then, it had a PC-based front end for the compositor. I got pretty good with an X-Acto knife. For the halftones, I would paste in the FPOs, and the printer would strip in the film as you describe.

Hah! I worked for a small town newspaper in NH at the same time and we did the same exact thing. My college newspaper as well. The laser printers at the time just weren't good enough for photos (probably the scanners and storage as well), so those were processed by a different machine and stuck on at the last minute. These were the days of QuarkXPress and having souped up Mac LEs plugged into massive black and white monitors for layout. A single change in a classified ad could take a minute or two to repaginate.

The main difference being that we didn’t use Quark for layout, we used MacWrite, I think, and would literally size our articles to 1-, 2- or 3-column width and then print them as one continuous column. We did all of our layout by hand instead of in the computer, so we’d cut up the paper and flow the columns into the layout on the board.

Quark definitely existed by then (I had used PageMaker at my high school newspaper to do the same task in years before). I think the paper stayed with manual layout because it would let a group of us collaborate on laying out the 5-10 editorial pages over a period of an hour or two.

My dad use to run an offset printing short in the 80s. (like shown the second page but smaller.) By that time technology was starting to improve but still mostly manual. He used to get a lot of business making video game manuals for a company that was nearby. They had one christmas given us a ton of their video game cartridges to play with. It was a small shop so we used to help our dad out in the weekend so along with helping him out, would read through all the books and publications that were being printed, particularly computer related. This was all the seed of my interest in computers. Sadly not much later he died of leukemia and I've always suspected that is was due to the all the inks and solvents he worked with on those machines.

That's so much easier than CSS

"The typist must type "blind:" there is no video display."

Seems odd since displays existed. Even tty machines would use paper as the "display" so you had some visual feedback for typos, etc.

I don’t think school newspapers typically have access to the most high end equipment.

I worked at Sears credit in the same time period. The tty machines would echo your keystrokes onto tractor fed paper for feedback. The blind entry just seems odd to me. It's an obvious impediment to quality, and avoidible without great expense at the time.

A tty was only a window into a larger computer that had memory, storage, etc.

This device was merely a transcription device from key presses to machine-readable code.

Anything more sophisticated and you're talking about a word processor.

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