For me the start of 2008 is a major anniversary. Forty years ago at the start of January 1968 I started my career in digitizing the publishing and printing industry. Prior to that time I had completed my degree in print management and had spent three years in management and sales roles within a UK printing group. I felt however that I could not see a future for a trained manager in the printing industry where the only opportunities appeared to be in sales. I thought that computing, a then embryonic industry, appeared to have a future and I managed to secure a role within the UK computer manufacturer ICT (later to become ICL). At that computers were very little used in any form of publishing and printing but ICT saw an opportunity to sell to newspaper and magazine publishers and recruited a team who claimed to understand these markets. I luckily was one of that team. The only computers used in newspapers at that time were the small 1130 mainframe from IBM and the DEC PDP8 mini computer. At ICT we introduced classified ad processing systems and sold these to a reasonable number of newspapers in the UK, Europe and Australia and New Zealand. In fact I started my globetrotting career planning and installing a newspaper in New Zealand’s largest newspaper in 1969.

It may well be that I have been digitizing the printing and publishing industry for longer than anyone else around today. Looking back over those forty years I have seen and been involved in a massive amount of change that has totally changed our markets. At the start of my digitizing career most newspapers still used hot metal for typesetting and our early systems used justified punched paper tape to drive the hot metal linecasters. Phototypesetting was used in many places but since most newspapers were printed by letterpress making letterpress-printing plates from film or photo paper was a complex process. In the printing industry we were already into the conversion from letterpress to offset litho and phototypesetting was starting to get established with the main suppliers being Photon, Mergenthaler Linotype and Harris (see how things have changed!) We still keyboarded to paper tape and early H&J computers were just starting.

The first major change for the industry came in the early 1970s when Compugraphic introduced its first low price phototypesetter. Frank Romano is reputed to have commented when he first saw this product that the output was crap! When being told the price of the phototypesetter he is reputed to have replied “not bad crap!” When I came across it I was working for RCA as European Systems Manager for its Videocomp ultra high-speed and ultra high price typesetter and was doing a press launch. A journalist from The Times newspaper commented that the new Compugraphic machine was one-fiftieth the price of the Videocomp but I replied you would need more than 100 Compugraphic machines and operators to match the Videocomp’s speed so the Videocomp was a cheaper machine. (You can see the makings of a good consultant here). Compugraphic and the wide range of typesetters it produced for all markets however fundamentally changed the industry as it came at the same time as newspapers were switching from letterpress to offset litho. Compugraphic typesetters were soon found everywhere, and the company was later acquired by Agfa.