On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 06:42:36PM -0400, Traveller Mailing List wrote:
> Ok, the younger members of the list won't have a clue on this one, unless
> they've a specific interest in early commercial printing technology.
>
> For those of you who are my age or older...
>
> [ ...snip... ]
>
> OK, enough digression.
>
> That bit about taking the sheets of letters, and pressing them onto the
> master page... There was a name for that "technology", and it was the name
> of the company that was more-or-less the standard/definition of it, just
> like "LinoType" was the "default" name for the "hot lead" text setup. What
> was that name?
>

As the others have said, Letraset and Chartpak (sp?) were two brands in the space. Back in
the day I was invested in that technology. I still have **Aldus** Pagemaker on floppy disks
for Windows 3.1 and remarkably, it still worked under Windows 7. I also have Pagemaker post
Adobe's purchase them and a handful of other Adobe products. Sadly, my true love was
operating systems and when I started writing drivers for Unix, a hobby had to go. Also of
note, my first laser printer was a NEC SilentWriter 2 Model 290. Effectively, this was an HP
Laserjet either I or II engine in an NEC case with an Adobe Postscript rasterizer in it. It
took about 3 ~ 5 years for HP to realize that they could sell a lot more printers if they
had a licensed version of Postscript. This printer predated the HP Postscript cartridge
add-ons by 2 ~ 3 years. The lovely thing about this rig was that you could take the .ps
output to a print shop with a Linotype machine and as far as the print shop was concerned,
they pretty much just had a faster, higher resolution _printer_ than you did. I used that
printer from 1993ish to about 2010ish. I supplimented it with an HP Business Inkjet that did
native postscript in about 2000 and I replaced the NEC with an HP Laserjet 4000TN in about
2007. By that time you could use Gnu Ghostscript as your rasterizer on almost any printer.

--
Chris

      __o          "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
    _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton                    [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]