scrutinizing yellow page graphics and then collecting business cards when i was 12, all for the looks of things. newspaper ads too. for a kid, very exotic stuff -- things i didn't understand made to be understood with images and composition. my earliest lessons. i ended up with an art MA and art history BA.
I used to look at the rosettes under a magnifying glass or later, a microscope. Little did I know that I'd end up working for a manufacturer of proofing equipment that produced rosettes using laser ablation technology even though I wasn't directly involved in the product I got to interact with the teams that worked with it in various capacities.
Using my network and server experience, I suggested that the networked automatic Prediction 2000, 1420, and 4000 proofing system products could be proofed to remotely since these systems used their own RIP PC running Solaris. A number of customers did this with modems and other network gear to allow a proofing device to be placed in another shop far from their prepress office. Another network-related technology I recommended was remote diagnostics. Utilizing SNMP and a modem, the systems could phone home to Latran, or send internal emails via the network to a support person on-site. With the remote proofing setup, this meant someone in another part of a company would receive a message when the unit had a paper jam or ran out of ink sheets.
The technology used on these proofing devices actually came from Polaroid's Medical Imaging Systems division or PMIS. These systems were the forerunners of the digital imaging we have today for x-ray and other MRIs. Polaroid's systems output x-ray images produced by an x-ray camera on to a special carbon-based black film that needed to be peeled apart. This film was then modified to a roll-form and sold as part of the Dry-Tech imaging systems. Dry-Tech film would be sent through a Linotronics 330 imagestter where there was a special peeler to pull the backing off the film. Just like in the early PolaProof, and later Prediction proofing systems, high-power 50W IR 15-micron dot lasers were used to ablate the carbon on to the sheets from the backing.
This technology was then transferred to the Graphics Imagining Division, aka PGI who produced the color-proofers. The 2540 dpi images were ripped to the Prediction where a large sheet of paper was placed on to a vacuum drum. The operator would then place one of the CMYK ink sheets one at a time on the imager to produce a high-resolution proof complete with halftones and rosettes.
I too was in typesetting business. I was Directory of Publishing Reuben H Donnelly back when Yellow Pages were published. Came up thru the ranks. Started part time while in college pasting in fillers on pasted up pages. Made the transition to digital pages and color. Left there in 1997 and did my own thing....
Wow. Typesetting was interesting but for me it was very stressful, probably because working for my dad made me on edge. The output from the Epics was sent to their 6830 Output device. This imaged on either 6-inch or 12-inch RC paper that had to be put through a processor. Once the type galleys were exposed, my dad and brother took them and cut them apart for pasting-up on boards with either rubber cement or wax.
The Varityper Epics 20/20 system was quite powerful. Running its own variant of Unix, the system used a mark-up language plus many other proprietary things. The system used to date-stamp files right down to multiple decimal points, allowing for multiple versions in succession. This was very useful for documents and I only wish other systems had this granularity. The US printing office used Varityper Epics or Comp-Set systems because of this and its powerful pagination ability. Setting up books in the system was a dream.
I discovered the mark-up language by accident. We did a newsletter (remember those?) for the Museum of Textile History. I won't go into the evil nature of the customer, but her jobs were always a nightmare because she did them in WordPerfect, double-spaced, and everything else to make them miserable. Because this job was so miserable, I had her give me the job on disk in non-document mode. Using the tele-communications package from Varityper, we were able to import the file directly into the Epics system to save a lot of time. Well... Her jobs came in with a gazillion tabs because she used tab, tab, tab, tab, tab to center text and tab, tab, to indent text, and so many other things, to make that process a nightmare anyway.
One day, there was a glitch. I had a place in the text I couldn't edit and the job crashed on output. Using the Telecom package, I sent the job back to my PC and opened it in a text editor. There I saw the mark-up language and fixed the bug by removing some smiley face thing that was embedded in the job. Using that mark-up language, I had my sister or mother type up the jobs on the connected PC to save me time when I was busy. The codes were similar but not the same as HTML with <b> </b> for bold, etc.
In addition to the typesetting system, we also had a photo-stat camera to produce the final art for the printers prior to them making plates. Occasionally, my brother would take a photo-stat and produce plates from it. He became quite the "stripper" as he got the various parts together, exposing, dodging, and burning the images. The imagesetter pretty much made this process easier for him since he didn't have to use the photo-stats first. While setting up the films, he'd punch the holes in the flaps. We ended up with more "orange dots" all over the place including in our clothes draws. Recently, while putting away some clothes, I came across some of those! It's been well over 30 years since he did any of this and they're still showing up!
I mentioned R H Donnelly to my brother and he said, Oh I remember them. I used to send paste ups to them for the Yellow Pages! Back in those days, my dad did some cover designs for NYNEX for their yellow pages books as well, so you probably not only received some camera-ready artwork from my brother but also designs from my dad.
