On Sun, Mar 24, 2024 at 03:39:45PM -0400, Peter Schaffter wrote: > Subject: Re: the Courier font family and nroff history > > On Sat, Mar 23, 2024, Steve Izma wrote: > > I tend to believe that Linotype was the driving force in the > > release of a complete package for corporate typesetters: the > > Linotronic 202 (or something like it) driven by Adobe's new > > PostScript rasterizer (RIP), using ITC fonts, and with two > > choices of front ends: either a very expensive inputting and > > editing terminal made by Linotype or else a much cheaper (almost > > hobby-level) Macintosh. > > I worked in a shop in the early '90s that used a Linotronic RIP > connected to two dedicated Linotype terminals and several MacIIfx > computers. I wouldn't call those Macs cheap or hobby-level, not by > a long shot. :)
Hi Peter, You're right about the the 1990s-era Macs, but I'm trying to recall the situation around 1985. I certainly couldn't afford a Mac at that time but I'm pretty sure that small-to-medium-sized printshops could, since they'd be so much cheaper than the Linotype devices. But the Linotype frontends were essentially single-purpose ones, weren't they? So they would have become obsolete quickly. I also recall that Macs were the favourites of art-school students starting in the mid-1980s because the machines were more oriented towards graphics software than the early Windows systems. I think this was a factor in driving development of Macs to the point that in the 1990s their sophistication and prices sky-rocketed. Those students became the scriptorium scribes for ad agencies and must have had an influence in the technological shifts in the design industry. But to me, the early Macs were only a couple of steps above video-game devices. Do you remember what the costs of the Linotronic machines would have been? At WLU Press, we were able to do things much more cheaply with PCs running Unix-like software (MKS Toolkit) driving a nearly obsolete Merganthaler VIP up until about the mid-1990s. That was for high-quality output. For quick-and-dirty work to produce low-printrun scholarly monographs we used SQTroff on 386/ix (I think it was called) running fairly good laser printers. We also sometimes used SQTroff as ported by MKS to MS-DOS up until I got the hang of groff and linux (1996?). -- Steve -- Steve Izma - Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2H 1W6 E-mail: si...@golden.net cellphone: 519-998-2684 == The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question. -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin*, 1996