Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Steve Izma]

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: sizma@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