On Monday, 19 April 1999 19:00:00 UTC+12, Charlie Fred wrote:

Brad -

In its day, that system was the Cadilac of phototypesetters ($30,000
to $40,000). We had a competitive brand made by Itek Graphics. These
were highly proprietary machines.There was NO file transfer, except
perhaps to a sister machine that was sitting right next to it. The
floppies were probably readable only be the originating machine. The
OS was also proprietary - not even the technicians working on the
machines really knew what was going on. (It was probably a version of
CPM, if you can imagine such a thing).
Fonts were on serialized disks and could only be accessed by the first typesetter that the fonts were installed on. This was one reason that
the files were almost incompatible with another machine of the same
type - one machine could not read the font files of the other machine
(I may be slightly exagerating here). These font disks cost about
$120.00 each for a three font family - regular, bold, and italic.
There was no bold italic.

Of course with no HD, the OS had to be installed every time the
machine was turned on. You had to make your own backup of the OS -
each one was machine specific and would not boot another machine. If
the disk crashed without a back-up, you had to have a technician
rebuild a OS disk from scratch - don't ask me what that meant because
I don't know.

To keep your typesetter going, you bought a service contract at 20% of
the retail price of the machine per year. You would do this because
such things as power supplies cost $3,000 to $4,000 plus labor to
replace.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Now you know why MAC and PC typesetting is so great to us oldtimers.

IBM never made a phototypesetter. They had impact machines, but they
stopped making those when the phototyupesetters became popular.

Charlie

Hi Brad!

Don't know if you still use these forums or even still use this email address, but thank you for this fantastic write-up! I've been scouring the web for information too - after having been given the archives of the printing company that I work, Brebner
Print, seeing that we too had a Compugraphic! Needed information to go with an amazing photo of one of our previous employees using it back in the late 80's.

Cheers

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