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julesallen

63

Karma

2011-03-23

Created

Recent Activity

  • Absolutely agree, have been looking for something like this for a while now.

    Did you build this yourself? Would love to know more if you’d be so kind to share.

    Used to do similar things with Trello before the focus went all in on enterprise (getting acquired by Atlassian will do that).

  • There’s need and there’s want I suppose.

    My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM.

    Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.

  • Glad I'm not the only lunatic who would do something like this. At least until I got my paws on dBASE.

    I worked with somebody with your name in the early 90s on a Sequent/Dynix system, that wasn't you by chance was it?

  • Skimming this and thoroughly enjoying it, back in the mid to late 80s I worked in London's phototypesetting industry mostly serving ad agencies and others who needed high quality, quick turnaround type. I didn't work with Monotype, all Berthold, but it looks like they were all in a similar place.

    Check out the Cold Type section on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Type_Foundry#Cold_T... . What was fascinating about this is it wasn't laser produced type, it came from a serious of glass grids and prisms. Laser output at the time was awful and nowhere near production quality but this prism-based output could only scale from 4pt to 36pt(? or somewhere thereabouts). That said, because the type was photo perfect it could be put under a camera enlarger and blown up to over 96pt in the hands of a skilled operator.

    More notable things, these machines couldn't set type on an angle so as you were composing you had to take into consideration giving the paste up artist enough dance room to work. Spell check? Nope.

    The biggest one was it was all markup language and nobody really used visual rendering, you set it all in your head and sometimes you'd even get it right on the first try. There were visual rendering units but they were slow, inaccurate, and would _really_ slow you down in an industry where the faster you were the more money you made. This markup thinking made being creative with HTML tables a natural skill in '92 so it wasn't all for nothing.

    The Mac finally got PageMaker, photo paper laser output became good enough, and the last Berthold machines I saw were Sun workstations where I got my first taste of Unix. Fancy expensive kit where the rendering was fast enough to be useful.

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