I began working as a typesetter from 1982 – 1989 and experienced the transition from dedicated mainframe systems to systems based on what were then called microcomputers. Here are two documents among my stuff that show a little about that world.
Typefaces in the 1980s: ITC Type catalog
ITC Type Directory: Alphabet Soups
1984, Mo Lebowitz author and designer, illustrations by Lionel Kalish
We set an awful lot of Cheltenham Condensed back then! Now it has disappeared, although it was digitized early on.
The cost of doing business
Next, an advertisement from the mid-1980s.
The ad is for Magna, a typesetting system that ran on microcomputers, not mainframes. It used the same coding system as Computer Composition International (CCI) mainframe systems. You could switch your shop to this new maverick and not have to retrain your work force. Magna was breaking up the old single-vendor system.
In the late 1980s, the shop I worked for in San Francisco had about 6 CCI workstations and 2 Magna workstations. Those Magna workstations were used to set MacWorld (then a huge, fat magazine). The copy came to the shop over a modem, passed through a shop-built program that search-and-replaced editorial codes with Magna typesetting codes. Multi-column galleys came out the Linotronic imagesetter.
The personal computer was just starting to change the world.
[This month I’m sorting through my archives and intend to share some of the things I’ve saved over the years. I apologize for my lack of photography technique. I’m trying to sort out and give away and decide what to save, so I’m taking photos as I pack and unpack . . .]
vjb • scribe 