194f The Quadritek 1200 Phototypesetter Itek's Quadritek 1200 photo typesetting system. Back to the Future: 1977 The Quadritek photo typesetting system was an early solution to "affordable" professional typesetting. Built by the Itek Corporation (which no longer exists), the machine was geared toward the small business and educational market to fill their publishing needs. This was one of several typesetting machines that were supposed to make the craft more affordable. Starting at a whopping $17,000 this machine found its niche in markets where the cost of an even more expensive machine such as a Compugraphic photo typesetting system could not be justified. However, a machine like this was the ideal step up from setting type on archaic machines such as the IBM Composer, which was similar to the IBM selectric typewriter. Now folks, we are not talking 1990s technology here. No sir. The Quadritek came to the market in 1977 and lasted through most of the 1980s before the personal computer and desktop publishing eventually killed it and all the other phototypesetting machines not so long ago. What made this machine so neat? If you were setting type by hand or on an IBM composer, the benefits of having a Quadritek in your work area were immense. First of all, the IBM composers could only set type up to 12 or 14 points. Anything else larger required you to use either press on lettering or a headlining machine, which took time to do. The Quadritek 1200 allowed you to set headline type up to 36 points large! Wow! (Later models pushed the range up to 72 points). The Quadritek allowed users to have 4 fonts online at the same time. Compared to having only one font online with the old IBM composer, this indeed was a huge step forward. A typical job being set on the Quadritek would include the weights of bold, regular, italic and compressed for a single font family to a particular job. Like the composer you had to stop the job if it required a change of font to something different like a script. Unlike the composer you could set type from as small as 5 1/2 points to 36 points all on the fly without stopping as long as you used the same 4 fonts online at a given time. The Quadritek was supported by the ITC type library for many years. Quadritek fonts came on glass wafers which would spin on a fast moving carousel inside the machine. As you entered your text or if you had the machine print the text out later, the photo light beam would rapidly shoot an image of each letter of the font to photo sensitive paper that came out from the other end of the machine. The type output would then be run through a photo chemical process, dried and later pasted up the old fashioned way to a layout board. Needless to say the type coming out of these machines were very beautiful and yielded a very high DPI resolution. Compared to the early 300 dpi laser printers that people used on early Macintosh and PC computers, nothing could come close to the Quadritek. Secondly unlike the old IBM composer, whatever you typed into the Quadritek could be saved to tape... yes... cassette tape, which came before the advent of floppy discs to these machines and early personal computers. So like if you needed to edit a job or start a new job, the file you were working on could be saved to tape and retrieved later (line by line) on tape for editing, updating or whatever. If you were stuck with an IBM composer, well you had to finish the entire job, run it out and then move on to something else. The old IBM composer never had a data storage system, and what little was stored was only in the machine's miniscule amount of RAM. Needless to say, if something went wrong like a power outage while you composed text on the IBM, all of your work would be lost. Not on the Quad... if you remembered to store your keystrokes on the tape, jobs could easily be recalled, fixed, changed and run out again. The Biggest Drawback Perhaps the biggest drawback in using the Quadritek or any other computerized phototypesetting unit of the time was mastering the complex, command line interface. This was not a "What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)" system common to today's graphical interface computers. No sir. Setting type on the Quadritek required you to memorize common mnemonic code and key combinations in order to get the type set at the right size, style, length, width, etc. Every action along the way had to be coded using commands to tell the machine to turn type attributes such as bold, regular or italic on and off. Needless to say, if you forgot to put in a cancel code for bold on one word, your entire paragraph or possibly entire job could end up being all bold.. without you knowing it until after the job was printed! In this case you would have to go back over the job and check to see where the unending bold started, and then go back through the tape one line at the time to key in the cancel bold sequence. Because of this you really had to concentrate and be a master of the machine. Similarly manually coding HTML webpages is kind of like setting type on the Quadritek. One thing goes wrong and your whole page can be shot... it could take a few minutes to a few hours to figure out where you went wrong, depending on the complexity of the job. I was lucky to have good teachers at the time I learned how to use the Quadritek. I learned the basics and got so interested in the machine that I learned most all of the other archaic commands so that I could practically format complex forms, tables, newsletters with columns, etc. in a totally command line, what you see is not what you get environment until the thing was printed out. People who could do this commanded big dollars if they found the right place to apply their skills. The Macintosh killed the Quadritek However as time would have it, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer and in time the entire graphics industry gravitated toward it and later PCs making the Quadritek and its kindren all obsolete. I don't know of anyone using a Quadritek or similar typesetting equipment for work today. In the end, the machines I worked on were either given back to the dealers who sold it to them, or donated to schools where they were probably left in some side room as a mere curiosity once computers like the Macintosh took over. =============================================== 0