On 11/7/19 2:27 PM, Jonathan Gevaryahu via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
This isn't the famous Linotron 202 phototypesetter that Condon, Kernighan and Thompson famously reverse engineered to fix a lot of bugs in it in the summer of 1979 as described in the paper at https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pdf but it is a related item, and intact phototypesetters are INCREDIBLY RARE. This could well be the last one of its type.
I remember being at the edge of the conversion. I worked for a company the created products for the news paper industry. We build a centronics interface conversion. The Linotron almost had a centronics interface except it was +/- 25v and it needed a few delays on the control lines. The thing smelled terrible (like strong vinegar). We used an Microware OS9 68000 (OSK at that point) system to interface news feeds to the typeset machines including the Linotron. At some point one of the developers also started working with a photosetter and the Mac. It was a tight squeeze to get it to work in 128K. The machine almost always had to be upgraded with memory and a hard drive. I wasn't involved with the Mac as much as the Linotron. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies