[TUHS] typesetting history

[gregg.drwho8@gmail.com (Gregg Levine)]

Hello!
On a setup like that?
 I may not know UNIX as much as I want to, as much as all of you, but
I do know my way around a DG Eclipse and a Mergenthaler 202. Do recall
who set things up? Because they did it wrong. That Mergenthaler 202
had a dedicated port for communicating with the host. The tape reader
was only used upon starting the machine when it gets uncrated by the
company rep. The new users need to follow a series of steps to load
the fonts into the machines internal storage. The user needs to use a
special system to write a FST tape to do that.

Now if you were talking about a Mergenthaler VIP then yes you'd need
to go through the tape device, a special contraption was constructed
to translate serial into something the tape device understood.

How do I know this? My father ran a series of phototypesetting shops
each being run by DG hardware, including that fellow. While those
systems didn't run the dedicated OS that DG normally supplied, they
ran one written for the purposes of doing composition.

Incidentally some of the features of UNIX were constructed to do
phototypesetting, and in this case that's how copies of the C
programming book were originally set.

Now I freely admit if someone did indeed succeed in porting UNIX to
that DG, and in fact that's why the two were connected that way, but
for the vast majority of shops during the late 80s and during most of
the 90s who bought the software I've described and also the hardware
that's how it was done.

The one who did not. picked the same hardware, but an APS Mark 5 type
printer......

I'd give one of my favorite character's lives (if possible) to obtain
one of those specialized terminals..... It was similar to the Altair
and ASR33 (with paper tape reader/punch feature enabled) but it used a
VDT.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Milo Velimirovic <milov at cs.uwlax.edu> wrote:
> Oh my! This brings back memories from the 1980s. I worked at a publishing company and had many dealings with a 202. I suspect that our travails were increased by the equipment we used to drive our 202, a DG Eclipse S/130 and a serial connection that used the paper tape reader interface.
>
>  - Milo
>
>> On Jun 17, 2015, at 12:31 AM, Aharon Robbins <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>>
>> I recently came across this:
>>
>>       http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202
>>
>> It's been there for a while but I hadn't noticed it. It describes the
>> trials and tribulations of getting the Mergenthaler 202 up and running
>> at Bell Labs and is very interesting reading.
>>
>> I have already requested that they archive their work with TUHS and
>> gotten a positve response about this from David Brailsford. In the
>> meantime, it's fun reading!
>>
>> Enjoy,
>>
>> Arnold
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