 | The Cavalier daily. Friday, October 4, 1968 |  |
Gutenberg To The Cavalier Daily
From Hand-Carved Blocks To IBM Computers
It was about 500 years ago that Gutenberg
invented the process of printing "from
movable type." In those days the blocks of
movable type were hand-carved and
hand-positioned in what was a very tedious
but very revolutionary procedure for putting
words on paper. During the 500 years which
have elapsed since Gutenberg's time his
process has been improved and modernized
and updated regularly to the point that it
barely resembles what he developed. The
culmination of the movable type process was
probably the well-known linotype machine,
similar to that of a typewriter; what he types
is set in reverse by lines in molten lead which
is then allowed to harden for letterpress
printing.
Even in its most advanced stages, however,
Gutenberg's rather cumbersome process could
not keep up with the times. All that heavy
lead, along with a very unsatisfactory process
of reproducing photographs by etching zinc
plates, proved incompatible with the sleek,
modern, fast-moving twentieth century. As a
result, an entirely new and different process,
offset printing, was born. This is a process for
which positive copy can actually be
photographed and a negative of it made; from
the negative a sheet-like plate is made from
which the final product is printed in multiple.
A side from the obvious technical
improvement of such a system over
letterpress, offset has an added advantage in
that no process has been developed yet which
can produce better photographs in print.
The Cavalier Daily changed over to offset
several years before it expanded to its current
eight-column size. Gutenberg was not
forsaken then, though, because the copy to be
photographed was still prepared to a large
extent in lead (instead of running off all the
copies from the lead as had been done,
however, only one copy was made from the
lead and it was then photographed). All of
this was done at the University Printing Office
behind the engineering school.
When the paper expanded two years ago,
nothing changed much from a technical
standpoint except that the offset work had to
be done in Culpeper (at the Culpeper
Star-Exponent) because no offset press large
enough was available in Charlottesville. The
editors were also able to negotiate later
deadlines with the printing office at that time,
which enabled the paper to become more of a
morning paper than the
afternoon-paper-released-in-the-morning it had
been.
At about the same time these
improvements were effected, an IBM salesman
had begun to interest the editors in a
revolutionary new process for preparing offset
copy which the computerized technicians of
his company were developing. The system,
called the IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric
Composing System, was to be one simple
enough for untrained students to operate
which would nevertheless turn out first-class
copy.
The following year's staff was convinced
enough of the desirability of the system to
order it on a rental basis with a provision in
the contract that whenever it was updated or
improved the old machines would be replaced
immediately by the more modern ones. The
arrangement with the printing office had
become increasingly unsatisfactory for the
paper as well as for the printing office, so the
decision to pull out of there was mutually
agreeable.
It was on this year's staff that the burden
of all these negotiations and plans and hopes
fell. The machines arrived in early September,
in time for the staff to learn how to use them
while putting out the 16 page orientation
issue. The old UVM office, which is next to
the Cavalier Daily offices, had been acquired
to absorb part of the expansion prerequisite
to moving the whole composing part (the
most lengthy and complicated) of putting out
a daily newspaper from a shop situation to
business offices. That room is now The
Cavalier Daily Composing Room and houses
four of the new IBM machines, a new light
table for pasting up the paper, a new
headliner, and a waxer (wax is used instead of
glue in the paste-up process). Two full-time
secretaries, who were hired to operate the
machines along with the members of the staff
and during the periods when the staff is not
there, and a paste-up man occupy the
Composing Room.
This is how it all works: in the News
Room there are three Recorders. Any reporter
can type his story on a Recorder with a
mistake, he has only to backspace and type
over it to correct it. What he types is recorded
on magnetic tape in a unit beside his
typewriter. When he finishes he rewinds his
tape, which is in a cartridge, and takes it into
the Composing Room.
There the tape is put into a computer.
Beside the typewriter (a glorified IBM
"Executive") which, with the computer,
forms the Composer, is a panel of buttons.
Depending on what is to be done with the
reporter's story, the appropriate buttons are
pushed, the machine is started, and the story
plays out in column form while the keys of
fantastic speed as if by magic. The Composer
can be made to do nearly anything anyone
would want to do with a body of type just by
pushing the appropriate buttons. It will justify
copy, center individual lines, print them flush
right or flush left, insert a string of dots, run
around a picture, etc., all on whatever
horizontal measure it is told to do so. Further,
it will either hyphenate or not hyphenate,
indent or not indent, and you can tell it how
much space you want between words in units
of about 1/90 of an inch in length. If all that
were not enough, a story can be edited or an
error corrected just by typing the new copy
on another tape and merging it with the
original tape.
When the story is ready for paste-up, it is
cut out in the proper width and handed to the
paste-up man. He then assembles everything
for a page on the light table and pastes it onto
a large dummy sheet in the order which it will
drawn in by hand (unfortunately with Bic
pens, which can get a little messy). When
everything is pasted in except the pictures
(they go to Culpeper on the 5:30 bus), the
four pasted-up pages are taken to Culpeper,
photographed, and printed in time to be on
the stands before the earliest classes in the
morning. The final deadline can be as late as 1
a. m.
The headlines are, of course, pasted in
right with the copy. They are set on a rather
elaborate machine which uses a photographic
process. The reporter puts a record-like disc in
position, sets the machine in accordance with
instructions on the disc, and pushes a button
as he spins the disc to each letter. With a little
effort he can set a headline which will fit its
designated column-width perfectly. The
headline comes out on a strip of film which is
then cut to the proper size.
So it is that the students who comprise the
staff of The Cavalier Daily are able to do
everything involved in putting out the paper
(except the final printing) right in the offices
on the fifth floor of Newcomb Hall. It takes a
lot more work on their part than it did, but
for the first time they are free to do it
however they choose, on their own terms, at
their own pace. The potential of such an
arrangement is enormous. With a little more
getting used to these new aspects of
publishing the CD, they should be able to
realize that potential more and more and to
put out a paper at least first-class in
appearance, and hopefully first-class in
quality.
The Cavalier Daily, however, is a
four-day paper. All the work necessary to put
out an issue can be done in an afternoon and
at night. That means that all these
ultra-modern machines, which are rented on a
twelve-month basis with Student Activities
Fund money, are useless to their primary
employer five mornings and one afternoon per
week and all summer. That, in turn, means
that they are available for use by other
publications. Those two full-time secretaries
are there largely for such jobs, and they are
trained "to the hilt" in the operation of the
machines. They are capable of setting copy
for any sort of publication, whether it be a
phone book, a literary magazine, a
dissertation, or an anarchist flyer. Type sizes
and faces, of which a large variety are
available, are changed merely by snapping
little golf ball-like fonts into place. They cost
are two of those machines which are used to
type (not print) form letters which don't look
like form letters; they are perfect for typing
papers, etc., which are worth more than
mimeographing if more than one copy is
needed. In short, almost any type of printing
job conceivable can be prepared for the offset
camera or in final form by these machines.
The happy part of it all is that such jobs can
be done less expensively.
Because The Cavalier Daily is a non-profit
organization with fixed costs in regard to the
machines, we (or rather the Student Activities
Fund) are better off if they are earning only
one dollar an hour than if they are idle. For
that reason our rates can be lower than those
of a commercial, profit-seeking printer. Six or
seven outside jobs are already lined up; we
hope every University publication which can
will avail itself of these machines. It's a matter
of paying money to the University (the
Student Activities Fund) rather than paying it
to an outside commercial interest. Happily,
most of the local printers have been quite
co-operative in the face of losing some of their
composing work (one actually recommended
the machines to a customer), as this is the
most difficult and time-consuming part of a
job.
We encourage anyone who has printing to
be done to come up to the offices and
investigate the prospects of having it done
here as soon as possible. Even if you have no
printing to be done it's worth a trip up here
one afternoon to see that computer perform.
After all, the students are paying the rent, and
so they should know where it's going. The
system is in full operation any afternoon
Monday through Thursday from 2 o'clock on.
| The Cavalier daily. Friday, October 4, 1968 | |