A slight off topic question, but I hope it is OK

[DR]

With some of the pictures of the PDP-1s here, the companion I/O device
of the Flexowriter got my very old neurons trying to connect to
something from the past.

This is as best of the facts as I can recall, so first bear with me and
if it is too far from 'computer interface' stuff, well, just tell me. 
If there are any people out there who may recall this, it may be here.

Back in the late 60s or early 70s I was very interested in fonts and
typesetting and such.  TeX hadn't been invented or widely available and
the output device to get a cheap small run output was non-existant.  I
recall seeing a laser printer which  could do all sorts of wondrous
things but was a bit later and about $10,000 US.

Anyway, this one church I fixed stuff for had a very unusual item.  It
was sort of like a standard typewriter but their pastor was fixated on
making the Sunday bulletins look as professional as possible, including
right justification.


This thing, if I recall, required you to type the text twice. The first
time through, I think, it counted the characters per line, and I don't
recall how, but maybe on a punch tape or maybe that is my imagination,
when you typed the line again, it added spaces to make the line even on
the right.  It may even have had a little proportional spacing but I
think that is a real stretch.  Anyway, it was like the old typing
classes in high school (yup, we didn't get to learn how to type  until
then unlike even pre-school kids now) where you'd type a line, then
finish it out to the right margin with numbers, then retype the whole
thing again with the number of spaces to add equal to the number at the
end of the line on the mark-up page.

I'm not sure what happened to that machine when they finally got a laser
to do the page preparation, so the name is lost to me.  I think it was
something like the Flexowriter, which ties in to seeing that  name with
this discussion of old PDP-1 devices, but cannot recall.


Perhaps there are folks here who are old enough with better memories who
may recall something like that machine.  Please let me know the name if
you do.

Thanks.

Dale

[John Stout]

Linotyper? We had one in our school magazine premises (Merchant Taylors' Boys School in the North West

of England) in the early 70s. Prior to that we'd used three letterpress machines, setting lines

of text mirror-image letter by mirror-image letter, then manually justifying by inserting

thin 'leads' between words. We still used the letterpress machines even when we moved

to litho-offset (far wider range of fonts and particularly sizes). I seem to remember on

a good day letterpress quality was far better, particularly in the vertical alignment

of letters, but this may have been because the machine was second-hand.

I seem to remember the Linotyper used daisy-wheel type elements to change fonts. 

After 15 years of teaching Computer Science at a sixth-form college I was awarded 

£100 which I spent on a letterpress course at St Brides Foundation, Fleet Street. It was nice to see that

my typesetting skills, though rusty, where still pretty good after 40 years. 

Happy memories, even if off-topic.

John Stout

[John Stout]

No,vVarityper. I seem to remember some sort of stepped cone which was involved in the

justification.

[John Stout]

I did mean just Varityper, or rather Vari-Typer: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vari-Typer?wprov=sfla1

John

[Bill E]

Since we're off topic anyway, and slightly on this topic, there was also the Graphic Systems phototypesetter. It used a PDP-8. It had swappable rotating font wheels that had characters on a plastic strip. A strobe light would fire to select the proper character which was transmitted via a fiber-optic coherent bundle to a carriage that moved the other end over the page image film. Quite the device. Its major claim to fame is that the original C handbook was typeset on it.

Bill

[Malcolm Ray]

This prompted me to reach for my bookshelf:

K&R first edition, 1978, as you said: "This book was set in Times Roman and Courier 12 by the authors, using a Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 running under the UNIX operating system".

"The UNIX Programming Environment", Kernighan & Pike, 1984: "This book was typeset in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using a Mergenthaler Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a VAX-11/750 running the 8th Edition of the UNIX operating system".

K&R second edition, 1988: "This book was typeset (pic|tbl|eqn|troff -ms) in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using an Autologic APS-5 phototypesetter and a DEC VAX 8550 running the 9th Edition of the UNIX operating system".

Bell Labs ate their own dogfood.

On Fri, 2026-01-02 at 04:58 -0800, Bill E wrote:

Since we're off topic anyway, and slightly on this topic, there was also the Graphic Systems phototypesetter. It used a PDP-8. It had swappable rotating font wheels that had characters on a plastic strip. A strobe light would fire to select the proper character which was transmitted via a fiber-optic coherent bundle to a carriage that moved the other end over the page image film. Quite the device. Its major claim to fame is that the original C handbook was typeset on it.

Bill

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[ChrisK]

I remember the Mergenthaler Linotron 202. We had one at Interactive Systems Corp in the early 80s. 

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[DR]

It seems others who like PDP stuff also were into the putting pretty
text onto paper, so I hope this deviation from topic was not too
offensive and brought forward memories and certainly names of things for
me to pursue. Thank you   Dale

[Clem Cole]

In the spirit of the message, I recommend looking at one of my favorite Ken Thompson papers from the early 1980s: "Experience with the Mergenthaler Linotron 202 Phototypesetter, or, How We Spent Our Summer Vacation"

That said, while a fun diversion from the PDP-1, this topic probably belongs on the COFF mailing list.  It was created as a place for this type of discussion because some people often stray from a given mailing's goals, which can bother forum readers who want to stay more focused.  If you don't know about it since many historical figures participate in this forum, you can often get the actual history from the players who were on the field.

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