Typography in the Olden Days
Anyone who can identify this machine is telling me their age. Back when Adobe was an idea being hatched between John Warnock and Chuck Geschke over lunch at PARC and PageMaker was floating around in Paul Brainard's brain and Apple operated out of a California back street garage and Microsoft was a tiny little startup over the hill in Seattle that we tried to find one day but couldn't (no Google map back then) and Douglas Engelbart was working away at ARC on something called a mouse-
Mrs. McFadden and student. it was faster than setting type on a stick and you didn't have to deal with a Linotype operator. But you had better know the coding info on the screen. No spell checker either. It's output was a twelve inch wide strip of photo paper from a roll in the machine that the students hung from wires and pipes in the lab to dry after being processed in a chemical bath. They were then cut up into repros to be pasted on a mechanical. And we thought it was the most modern system possible.
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litherland and whymeiry added this photo to their favorites.
michaeljamespinto (44 months ago | reply)
I'm surprised that you had a student operating the machine — at my school they had a small staff that would operate it and the students would hand in their speced copy. It's funny thinking back to this era because the school was very worried that we wouldn't have any practical skills after graduation so I must have been taught how to spec type at least three times!
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scleroplex (44 months ago | reply)
i am so glad someone took this photograph. lovely to see!
Alki1 (44 months ago | reply)
What I saw at a two-week summer workshop at GATF convinced me the student's future was in learning to operate the equipment as well as design the project because it was all coming together very rapidly. There were times that I felt like chicken little squawking "the sky is falling--the sky is falling!" But it really was falling.
Some of my sharpest students began to design with the machine. Unheard of!!!! There was no image of type on the screen, they just created the typographic layout in their minds using the coding. Way ahead of their teacher!
michaeljamespinto (44 months ago | reply)
Well if you think of it that experience is sort of like designing a web page with a text editor in the 90s. I'm still sort of waiting for the web to catch up to where desktop publishing was in the early 90s.
abi_huynh added this photo to his favorites. (44 months ago)
Alki1 (44 months ago | reply)
I firmly believe at the age of 80 that change, or even evolution, doesn't come about slowly, but hits with an enormous bam when we least expect it!!
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it is aai! (44 months ago | reply)
My father designed arabic letters on a Amstrad CPC 6128 in about the same way. As a child I thought he was a kind of wizard ;-)
Great picture and again, the story makes it complete!
LipYttо (44 months ago | reply)
Great picture.)
los corazones jóvenes fracasan. (44 months ago | reply)
Is it a Commodore, or some?
Alki1 (44 months ago | reply)
This machine was a Compugraphic EditWriter 8400 phototypesetter that had floppy disk storage on an 8-inch, 320K disk. This allowed the typesetter to make changes and corrections without rekeying, a big breakthrough for us! The Cathode ray tube (CRT) screen let us view typesetting codes and we could set type from 6 points to 72 points. We had five work stations in the classroom, constantly being used by the students and college publication department.
It was at this point in time that all hell broke out in type design with devastating results for the world class foundries. The phototypesetting companies were getting around the copyright on standard faces such as Times Roman by making small changes in their design and then renaming them as close to the original as possible.
_Untitled-1 (44 months ago | reply)
i wasn't born by then... but i know one thing for sure... parc is the only place in the world where it is completely operated by geniuses. :-)
Pawls added this photo to their favorites. (44 months ago)
Pawls (44 months ago | reply)
Wow... I must say: thanks for the history lesson!
Alki1 (44 months ago | reply)
Thanks everyone for all the kind words.
P.S. The only dumb ones at PARC were the Xerox administrators.
88888888888888888888888888888 added this photo to his favorites. (44 months ago)
Art of the Luggage Label (43 months ago | reply)
This brings back memories! Hey, where is my waxer for those type galleys?
Alki1 (43 months ago | reply)
I saw a grown man weep at a service bureau when he brought in a mechanical that he had placed on the back seat of his car. The sun had shown on it on the drive over and all the wax had melted with a sea of corrected repros floating around on the surface.
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