Paul, what was the timeframe when you worked on the system in Van Nuys? I worked for a large newspaper starting in 1978 and they made their own 330 seat Classified Sales Entry system because there wasn't anything out there that was big enough. It used Zentec ZMS-90 programmable terminals feeding Series /1 mini's that then fed IBM 3032 mainframe.
I was wondering if DEC had that system available during that time. Sent from my iPhone > On Mar 13, 2019, at 10:05, Paul Koning <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> On Mar 13, 2019, at 12:56 PM, Wayne S <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Atex, now Newscycle, also had a Classified Advertising system out at that >> time. I remember reading a article somewhere saying that Atex was going to >> use the J11 for that system. > > So did DEC, the "classified management system" (CMS) was part of TMS-11. I > spent some interesting times bug fixing it on site in Van Nuys. > >>>> On Mar 13, 2019, at 06:41, Toby Thain via cctalk <[email protected]> >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>> On 2019-03-13 9:31 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>>> On Mar 12, 2019, at 10:10 PM, Fritz Mueller via cctalk >>>>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Hmmm, are these the atex racks seen lurking in the background of that >>>>> recent storage space trawl down near Houston? >>>>> >>>>> https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-DEC-PDP-11-34-Minicomputer-With-Kennedy-Tape-Drive-J11-CPU-2-Terminals/123688125244 >>>> >>>> Interesting. Atex is, or was at one time anyway, a manufacturer of >>>> typesetting systems for newspapers. DEC was also in that business with >>>> Typeset-11 (TMS-11) but Atex was more successful, certainly for smaller >>>> newspapers because it used less expensive PDP11 models. >>> >>> Funny, I always associated it with big papers (I think the NYT used it?) > > Could be. Your second reference mentions a max of 200 terminals; I'm pretty > sure TMS-11 couldn't go that high even on a four node cluster (the largest I > remember, not sure if in theory it could go higher). > >>>> The "multi-processor bus" thing is curious. And I wonder what the >>>> terminals are like. If they are typesetting terminals, I think they >>>> support some sort of WYSIWYG editing setup -- that too was a competitive >>>> advantage vs. the "mark-up" approach (sort of like Runoff on steroids) >>>> that Typeset-11 offered. Looking at the keyboards would give a clue. >>> >>> Pretty sure Atex was pre-wysiwyg. This article may provide some context >>> on that: >>> >>> >>> https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/17/business/can-atex-keep-its-proprietary-place-in-the-newsroom.html >>> >>> & >>> https://books.google.ca/books?id=IAGotP-IDocC&lpg=PA1827&ots=jEwR7s7dWM&dq=atex%20customers%201970s&pg=PA1827#v=onepage&q=atex%20customers%201970s&f=false > > That talks about direct to plate, text and graphics. I meant just the text. > On the DEC product, you'd see a typical VT100 style typewriter font display, > with line breaks and hyphenation shown only after you did "send to J&H" to > have the line breaks calculated in a batch process. It wouldn't give you > line breaks, or article length which is important to editors, in real time. > I think Atex did provide J&H in real time. It might still have been > typewriter font, so it wouldn't be a display showing the actual text with the > letter shapes as printed, but for a newspaper editor that's not particularly > important. > > TMS-11 did support some specialized devices that could do more. There was > the classified page layout system using a Tek 4010 style display (4015? A > BIG tube). And there was some experimental work to extend that to news page > layout though there wasn't much interest in that apparently. And it could > drive Harris 2200 terminals which were display ad creation devices (full > graphics WYSIWIG displays) using the ugliest network protocol I've ever > encountered. But the way the system was usually used (1978-1980 when I > worked on it) was that output was generated in single column wide strips of > film, which would then be pasted to page layout boards to produce the > finished page layouts. > > paul >
