Calgary Herald 1975

[Dave Hughes]

Taken at the time of the paper's transition from hot type to photo (approx. 1975), these photos were recently posted on Flickr by "Bernie"

Calgary Herald used these Linotype machines to set type for production of printing plates to print the daily newspaper. Around 1974, they decided to computerize the process and go to a new process called 'cold type'.

Looks like an Elektron:


Hot Type by OldDogNewTrick, on Flickr

Bernie also took a pic of the first-generation photosetting equipment:

Two Honeywell H-316 minicomputers and a Honeywell H200 mainframe computer installed at Calgary Herald in 1975. They were transitioning away from hot metal typesetting with Linotype machines into the brave new world of computerized typesetting. (cold type) And I was the monkey who developed the typesetting app on the H200 mainframe. Quite an achievement considering the machine only had about 32K of memory. (and those were 6 bit characters at that)

Reporters and writers would type out their copy with IBM selectric typewriters, and then the sheets were fed into an OCR reader that would convert the type written pages to computer code. One of the mini-computer at left was the communications interface to read the data from the OCR reader and send it to the mainframe on request. Then after running through the typesetting process, the H200 would send the copy back to the other minicomputer that would then send the justified and hyphenated output to a Metroset machine that printed out the output in a form that can be used to make the printing plates.

Typesetting computers by OldDogNewTrick, on Flickr