On 2/28/2012 9:45 AM, Raymond E. Feist wrote:
On Feb 28, 2012, at 8:38 AM, Jean-Marc Bourguet wrote:
I doubt it was typeset by manually assembling types. At the time, my
bet would
be on photo-typeset (i.e. using specialized machines doing a somewhat
cruder
version of what computers are now doing: making films for offset
printers)
or perhaps hot metal (a 19th century techniques whose machines stopped
being manufactured
mid 80's if I'm not mistaken).
Laser printers BTW is an early 70's technology.
Yours,
You'd be wrong. In 1982 when Magician was published, publishers were still
resistant to anything non-traditonal. Doubleday owned their own printing plants in
Garden City, NY, millions of dollars of installed infrastructure and they were
change adverse. Magician had custom type fonts designed by some art director and
book designer, and was set by linotype machine (manually, but not slugging type into
a type frame from a California job case). We started sending discs (4.5"
floppies) about the time we were doing Prince of the Blood, and didn't get to
e-mailing text files until about Shadow of a Dark Queen.
For a better rule of thumb, remember that technology gets developed
early, but can take forever to hit the true "disruptive stage" (to
summarize Clayton Christensen). Especially in the cases of inertia as
mentioned by others. For example:
Gary Starkweather's idea for laser printing was 1969, but the Xerox 9700
didn't come out until 1977. The HP Laserjet and Apple LaserWriter II
came out in the mid-1980's, but was still "new technology" for a lot of
places even in 1988.
The LED concepts were discovered as early as 1907 and "invented" in
several forms from 1927 until initial adoption in the late 60's/early
70's. Commercial LED lighting is still fairly new (and not cheap yet)
for cars and home lighting.
X-Ray Lithography for circuitry has been around since the 1980s, but
still isn't in used by the large-scale semiconductor production equipment.
Xerox has been trying to digitize the Commercial Offset Printing
industry for at least 20 years, but has only made a small dent in the
$80B industry so far.
The early CCDs were in the mid 50's, the digital camera in the early
1970's, the earliest commercial digital camera in the early 1980's, but
Kodak's digital sales didn't overtake analog until 2006.
-Ray
