Rumor has it that Dave Brown may have mentioned these words:
>Had these brought to my attention a few days back-I think they have been
>sitting there for several weeks.
>
>http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~tractorb/editwriter.JPG
>
> They are/were Compugraphics Editwriter 7300 systems- while I have pretty
> much decided these are of no significance historically (basically a
> dedicated word processor as I understand) and therefore I will NOT go
> 'rescue' even one of them- has anyone a contrary view? Or any further
> info to contribute about 'em?
I don't know a ton about these things, but having spent 3 years as a
graphic artist at a printshop, I can definately tell you these are *not*
word processors -- they're typesetters.
Input was with a keyboard, for sure - but it has a dedicated program using
commands similar to today's HTML, but designed for text layout -- to change
point size was <PS##>, to change a font was <FT##> & many other commands.
[[ the systems I used were the Compugraphic PowerView 10 (mostly) and 5
(sometimes) -- these were special machines running on an 80186 and booted
from floppy. (There might have been a hard drive interface for 'em, but you
wouldn't wanna see the price!!!) They had up to 1 Meg of RAM, and the
OS/Main Program took *most* of it -- I only had about 23K of text/code
entry [Methinks the codes were tokenized] and altho there were some very
basic looping commands, it wasn't hard to use up whatever stack space was
allocated. ]]
Output was to special B&W photographic paper, and on the lower end systems
the "graphics processor" was a belt or disk with each individual font
character on it, which a bright light was shown thru, and lens systems
changed the size of each character as needed. These things were *noisy*! (I
used the Compugraphic 8016 output unit -- big, noisy ancient behemoth,
which you had a maximum of 16 fonts (including line drawing, if you had it)
on a mylar disk. I think the metrics were a seperate "barcode" to tell the
machine how much room each character took. These disks needed weekly (or
more) cleaning, and if you had a light/clear spot on the disk, it had to be
fixed or else they were useless...
Later in life, I used a [brainfreeze on the model number] output unit that
did everything with a CRT to create the characters, lenses to change the
size, and fonts & metrics were all on floppy.
IIRC, on the later unit, the output was somewhere in the 2400DPI range.
(this back when lasers barely made 300dpi, and Canon's bubblejet was just
getting up to 180x360 dpi...)
HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch_at_30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????
Received on Sat Oct 19 2002 - 11:56:01 BST
