[GreenKeys] tech of a "certain age"

[Bryan Brodie]

Hi Folks,

As a teenaged minicomputer operator (HP3000) for a financial news
service (Media General) in the late 1970s, I recall the
phototypesetting darkroom at the Richmond Times Dispatch. This
division created detailed financial reports similar to the inside
pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is the same Media General that
Warren Buffet just acquired. They were Bloomberg, before Bloomberg was
cool...

Anyway, I had the rare occasion to enter the darkroom and was amazed
at the miles of baudot mylar tape being punched out and then fed into
phototypesetters. I have no recollection of what hardware was used,
but I do recall that the tape readers used light cells and not
mechanical "fingers" to read the tapes. Both the readers and punches
were blazingly fast, nothing like the ASR33 from high school. The room
reeked of developer and fixer chemicals, and was kept at what felt
like degrees 58F.

Once processed, strips of negative film with stock and bond prices
would emerge from the other end of the phototypesetters. A human would
then use an x-acto blade to separate the columns, lay them out and
paste them up into full pages as input to another process which
created printing plates.

I'm assuming the data originated from some stock market wire service.
It was one of the most chaotic technical operations I've ever
witnessed. I have no idea how they got that published on time five
days a week. The manager of that section was generally considered to
be crazy, and nobody messed with him.

I also remember a school field trip in the 3rd grade to the same
Richmond Times Dispatch and watching the Linotype operators compose
the evening edition's news. I was given a line of type with my name on
it, but I have no idea what happened to it.

Long live old tech - you'll need it after the Chinese EMP... ;-)

Bryan Brodie


>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "David I. Emery" <die at dieconsulting.com>
> To: Jeffrey D Angus <jdangus at att.net>
> Cc: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
> Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 03:08:09 -0400
> Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Digitronics Dial-o-verter in Transatlantic Teleteypsetter Link
> On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 01:31:59AM -0500, Jeffrey D Angus wrote:
>
>         Those of us of what for women is called a "certain age" (aka old
> phartes) may remember this well, as there was an era in the development
> of computers when minicomputers used and read paper or later mylar tape
> to load programs and data.   So for that matter did a variety of other
> things common in that era, ranging from missile guidance systems to
> crypto key loaders... and lots and lots of numerically controlled
> machinery such as numerically controlled milling machines and circuit
> board drill systems.
>
>         Needless to say producing all that punched tape efficiently
> required high speed punches, some of which certainly could go much
> faster than even 100 rows a second.   Relying on 10 character a second
> Teletype gear to punch the quantities and lengths of tapes involved
> would have taken absolutely forever...
>
>         And myriads and myriads (in the minicomputer world especially)
> of high speed photoelectric readers... to read all those tapes in finite
> time.
>
>         Both made tape fly past punches or readers at high speed and
> both could and often did make huge messes when the tape jammed.  And
> all too often in the ancient minicomputer world the jam would happen
> after literally several minutes of reading tape and all too regularly
> would destroy the last copy of some program tape one needed, requiring
> slow hand patching of the damaged tape with special scotch tape splices
> and a complete reread of that and maybe other tapes before one could
> get any work done.
>
>