Reply To: 1970s Typesetting

BTW. These “font discs” weren't anything like this one: https://www.flickr.com/photos/s…..217486415/ (I used those 8″ disks later — they stored about 288K of data). No, they were quite literally “a disc with a font on it”: https://www.flickr.com/photos/s…..217486482/

It worked like this: the imagesetter (physically!) moved the disc closer to or further away from the photographic paper to make the image smaller and larger. (Of course there were upper and lower limits to the font size, also in a quite physical sense.) Then it rotated the disc to the correct character and flashed once or possible multiple times (we could do that to mimick Poor Man's Bold).

It went like “ricketytickety” for several minutes (typically, about 15 min. per would-be page), then rewind and beep for the operator's (me) attention, either to swop disks and re-do for the next font, or declare the job finished and develop and fixate the paper.