Discussion

By Bob Howard on Mar 12, 2021

Fantastic piece looking into the past and as I was part of that past you're making me feel really old. LOL
Thanks Frank for another great video

By Andrew Tribute on Mar 12, 2021

Great piece Frank and I was amazed at the wonderful selection of products from the past. My first experience was with the Monophoto which I first came across at the London College of Printing. I was surprised not to hear mention of Photon whose 540 and 713 machines had a major impact. I appreciate that you would need a much bigger room to get many of the other machines that had serious impact in the market. Particularly this would have been the case with the really high speed machines like the RCA Videocomp, Harris CRT and Photon Lumitype ZIP. In terms of laser the key aspect of these was that being raster rather than character based the whole page had to be created before it could start. The Monotype Lasercomp showed what could be done and we really created a major impact when we output full newspaper pages with images. At the ANPA exhibitions we showed how we could include images scanned on an ECRM Autokon scanner in the booth and input straight into a page. As you said the imagesetter got replaced by the plate setter that started if I remember correctly in Denmark in the late 1970s, but rapidly the market switched to the Creo and Kodak developments in thermal imaging. As was stated the next move was to eliminate the film and plate process and go straight to paper first in monochrome and then in color with Indigo and Xeikon. I may have retired some years ago but it is great keeping up with Frank as he shows how it all has changed. Having started in the industry about the same time as Frank this all brings back great memories.keep it going Frank.

By Jim Hamilton on Mar 12, 2021

Frank, the only thing missing was the smell of the photo processing chemicals. Can you include that somehow in the exhibit at the Museum of Printing?

By Sean Smyth on Mar 12, 2021

My first job in a printer in the (late) 1970s was to dump a load of beautiful metal type, engravings and woodblocks because they bought a phototypesetting machine. I was there for 6 weeks (I was a student on a summer job - beer wasn't free in the 70s) and they effectively made their letterpress machines obsolete while I was there. I had a lead slug of my name made - it took about 45 minutes from the Linotype, while it was cooling I got a bromide in about 2 minutes from typing.
Although I didn't know it then, that was amazing!

By Dov Isaacs on Mar 13, 2021

What nostalgia!

I remember when Wang Laboratories bought GSI. I was managing the group that migrated Wang Word Processing (including all Z80-based workstations and output devices with their WP/OIS firmware) to the VS series minicomputer which provided file services. I did the integration of the Wang (formerly GSI) Typesetter to the VS minicomputer.

To notify Dr. Wang of the completion of the task, I loaded the typesetter with its Old English font film strip, appropriately marked up a Wang Word Processing document on a VS workstation and sent my “status report” (using Old English as the font) to the typesetter. I developed the paper and sent it off to Dr. Wang's office. Within a few minutes I got a congratulatory phone call from Dr. Wang; that status report looked very different from anything he previously saw. Being able to get typographic quality output was totally addictive and guided my career from that point on!

By Muhd Yusuf on Mar 15, 2021

Thanks, Frank!