We bought some sodas and some of the Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade. Could be fun to get them out while watching a "fun" movie. Maybe we'll get to that tonight. If David doesn't come over, that is. I've had enough Star Wars for a while. (David came along for shopping, too, and also bought a lot of groceries. He must have been out of a lot of stuff.)
Sunday night, we watched "Destry Rides Again" with Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. And I started writing this.
But I'll warn you right now: It's really dull. So feel free to read only every fifth paragraph. Or every 10th. Or skip it altogether. It's about how the newspaper business has changed in the last 30 or so years. The actual process, that is.
Consider yourself duly warned.
*****
My original plan was to write about how computers changed photography. Somehow, though, I wound up writing how computers changed the type-setting process. I first got to see that when I was in college, since I worked nights at a daily paper as a copy boy. I became familiar with the entire hot-type process. Typewritten pages, edited with copy pencils, and set into hot type via a guy operating a Linotype machine.
What a bizarre dinosaur that was! The machine had three keyboards (not at all like typewriter keyboards) with hundreds of tiny brass matrices above it, used to set the lines of type, each of which was cast individually. (More about it here. And this is an interesting page about how the machines worked, if you are interested in the mechanical details.)
The Linotype was large, noisy and had the aroma of hot lead around it--because "pigs" of a lead alloy hung on the back of the machine, the bottom end in something that was melting the lead so the Linotype could cast lines from those matrices, according to what the typesetter had typed.
Once the story was finished, a galley proof was made and sent downstairs to the newsroom for proofreading. Eventually all those lines of lead type were physically carried to a page form, where they were set in place. The headlines were assembled by hand, letter-by-letter, in something that I think was called a composing stick. To do something like that, you had to read the letters upside down and backwards, so they would appear correct when printed.
Eventually the page was finished and a curved plate was made via a process that I never got to see. All those curved plates were placed on the presses, and that's how your daily newspaper was printed every day, every city, everywhere for years and years and years.
When I started at the paper up here 25 years ago, I used an electric typewriter. They had already switched to the cold type process, which used a photochemical process. The stories were typed into a photo-typesetting machine that had a tiny, red, one-line readout and that was very loud. Filmstrips with the letters for various typefaces had to be attached to a revolving drum--the source of the loudness. One font at a time--when you had to use a different font, you switched off the machine and waited for the drum to stop rotating before you could make the filmstrip change.
The type was "printed" inside the loud machine on photosensitive paper that wound up in a magazine. When the story (or ad or whatever) was finished, then you walked the magazine over to the developer, fed in enough leader so it was taken by the rollers and then (most important) closed the door to keep the light out. The thing would rumble (nowhere near as loud as the typesetter), and pretty soon you would see the photosensitive paper coming out the back--with your story (or ad or whatever) on it.
From there, you took scissors and physically cut the story down to the margins and hung it on hooks for each section. When you laid out the paper, you put the stories on large layout "dummy sheets" with faint blue lines on them. The photosensitive paper was waxed (hopefully on the right side) and placed on the layout sheet and rolled down. Of course, you had to refill the chemical jugs all the time and occasionally give the waxer another chunk or two.
The layout part of the process lasted a long time, but the typesetting system changed a lot. First, we got computers! Yes! The first ones we got were large and had tiny screens. Maybe six or seven inches diagonally. And the stories were saved on disk--on none-too-trusty, none-too-durable 5 1/2-inch floppy discs. Hey, it was the 1980s, and we were computerized! (They had a machine "retired" in the basement that used 8-inch floppies, which preceded the 5 1/2-inch varieties.)
Before long, our machines joined them in the scrap heap, and we got Apple Macintoshes. I think they were Mac IIs, with maybe a nine-inch diagonal monochrome screen--and a graphic interface. And they used 3 1/4-inch more-reliable, less-floppy floppies that stored more data. Woo! Way cool!
After a couple years, I even got a second-hand hard drive. Woo hoo! I could store 20 megs of stories and stuff, and it seemed like a lifetime supply! The only trouble with the Mac IIs is that the video would go out pretty often. I was regularly driving Macs off to the next city, which had a place that serviced them. Then they announced that were getting out of the Mac business.
So we converted to the IBM/Windows platform. I think that's around about the time we went to laser printers and gave the noisy, chemical-eating Compugraphic machines the heave-ho. We were networked and could print on the same printer. (After a while, though, we realized that several printers would be better.)
Over the years, the computers went from Windows 95 to Win 98 to Win XP. I think my present-day computer was originally one of the Win 98 machines, but it's been upgraded to XP now. We got the Win 98 machines from a local distributor, and most of us on the staff had the same opinion about them: They were cheap and crappy.
Most of them are gone now; I think mine and the receptionist's are the last ones left. The others have gotten Dells, complete with thin-screen monitors. Good for them. In due time, I'll get a nice, fast, new one with gobs of memory, too. (I think that's what convinced me to go for a little extra when I ordered my own new desktop for home, with lots of memory, a dual-core processor and a 20-inch widescreen monitor. Ooh, that's the only way to fly!)
In line with our conversion to digital photography (which was planned as the original topic of this entry--well, maybe next time), about two years ago we made the final break from the past. No more dummy pages. No more waxer. No more scissors work. We went to desktop publishing, and now we lay out our pages inside the computer. We are using Adobe Pagemaker 7 for that. Yes, Adobe's flagship desktop publishing program today is InDesign, but we haven't made that move yet. I think my company's (ahem!) frugality (that's the nice word for it) has something to do with it. But time will catch up with them, as it always does.
The guy who came over for a one-day training session told us, "In a few weeks, you won't ever want to go back." He was quite accurate there. As I wrote this, it took a while to remember all the miniscule steps and the sundry frustrations with the old process. Such as when a story went for a swim in the waxer, and you had to print out a new one at the other end of the office. When sharp scissors were in short supply or gummed up with wax. When you had to cut up stories so they would look nice on the page--physically creating space between paragraphs--and when you had to revise your layout when things didn't work out as hoped. When you discover that you had gotten parts of scissored-up stories out of order.
It's a dim memory already, and it's getting dimmer all the time. No, I don't miss it. Times change, and we have to, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment