CAT (phototypesetter)
Encyclopedia
The GSI C/A/T is a phototypesetter
developed by Graphic Systems in 1972. This phototypesetter, along with troff
software for UNIX
, revolutionized the typesetting
and document printing
industry. Phototypesetting is most often used with offset printing
technology.
The GSI C/A/T phototypesetter was marketed by Singer Corporation in 1974 and later the company was purchased by Wang Laboratories in 1978.
Graphic Systems designed a simple computer front-end to print basic text as display type. Full scale page composition computing was designed at Bell Laboratories as part of the UNIX project.
C/A/T optics consist of a rotating wheel to which are attached film strips of master font characters. There are four such replaceable font film strip sections on the periphery of the wheel. A xenon strobe inside the wheel is programmed to flash the characters from the font films through magnification optics to a fiber-optic bundle. The programmable location of the fiber-optic bundle determines the horizontal position of the character image on a scroll of photographic paper or film.
C/A/T is a highly addressable phototypesetter with full optics control from computer generated data. This precise control of optics and image position makes the interface to computer programs reasonably simple. Data is normally transmitted to the C/A/T by paper tape. Some companies created electronic replacements for the paper tape interface to accommodate direct connection to computer systems. C/A/T has no page layout and pagination capability. It is only a high resolution printer that puts high-resolution character images onto a photographic media. Page layout is determined by the typesetting software used to generate the paper tape.
Noteworthy typesetting software created for the C/A/T include troff
(1973), which was developed by Joe F. Ossanna
at Bell Labs
. Brian Kernighan
later developed the ditroff (typesetter independent troff) program which supports the C/A/T and other publishing systems. C/A/T was the workhorse of UNIX printing through the 1980s for those shops that could not afford hot lead typography equipment or expensive and proprietary document typesetting systems. High resolution laser printing, now common in desktop publishing, was not yet available.
Graphic Systems did not have the marketing capability to satisfy the growing demand of the phototypesetting business. Singer Manufacturing Company around 1975 acquired the rights to market the hardware, including placing the Singer C/A/T logo on the products. Singer continued to support C/A/T systems until 1979. Graphic Systems was bought by Wang Laboratories
in 1978. The phototypesetter was then known as the Wang Graphic Systems C/A/T with continued support through the 1980s.
Advances in the electronic typesetting programs like ditroff by Brian Kernighan
(1979), TeX
by Donald E. Knuth
(1979), and LaTeX
by Leslie Lamport
(1981–1983) finally allowed the C/A/T phototypesetter to become obsolete. The C/A/T phototypesetter continued to be prevalent in many UNIX based documentation shops until high quality laser printers became prevalent in the marketplace.
Phototypesetting
Phototypesetting was a method of setting type, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing software, that uses a photographic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper...
developed by Graphic Systems in 1972. This phototypesetter, along with troff
Troff
troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s...
software for UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, revolutionized the typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
and document printing
Printing
Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....
industry. Phototypesetting is most often used with offset printing
Offset printing
Offset printing is a commonly used printing technique in which the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface...
technology.
The GSI C/A/T phototypesetter was marketed by Singer Corporation in 1974 and later the company was purchased by Wang Laboratories in 1978.
Graphic Systems designed a simple computer front-end to print basic text as display type. Full scale page composition computing was designed at Bell Laboratories as part of the UNIX project.
Features
The C/A/T phototypesetter has the following features:- Punched paper tape is the method of document input.
- Four font film strips with 102 characters or glyphs per strip.
- Canisters of photographic paper or film to receive the image.
- Each character can be set in 15 distinct sizes (5pt to 72pt).
- Horizontal positioning precision is 432 units per inch.
- Vertical positioning precision is 144 units per inch.
C/A/T optics consist of a rotating wheel to which are attached film strips of master font characters. There are four such replaceable font film strip sections on the periphery of the wheel. A xenon strobe inside the wheel is programmed to flash the characters from the font films through magnification optics to a fiber-optic bundle. The programmable location of the fiber-optic bundle determines the horizontal position of the character image on a scroll of photographic paper or film.
C/A/T is a highly addressable phototypesetter with full optics control from computer generated data. This precise control of optics and image position makes the interface to computer programs reasonably simple. Data is normally transmitted to the C/A/T by paper tape. Some companies created electronic replacements for the paper tape interface to accommodate direct connection to computer systems. C/A/T has no page layout and pagination capability. It is only a high resolution printer that puts high-resolution character images onto a photographic media. Page layout is determined by the typesetting software used to generate the paper tape.
Timeline of GSI C/A/T phototypesetting
- 1971, Graphic Systems designs and markets the C/A/T phototypesetter.
- 1972, Graphic Systems provides a simple computer front end to handle display typesetting from text input using a standard set of fonts.
- 1973, Bell Laboratories purchases a GSI C/A/T phototypesetter for their UNIX software development team.
- 1973, The troffTrofftroff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s...
software is created by Joe F. OssannaJoe OssannaJoseph F. Ossanna was a Member of the Technical Staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey...
at Bell LabsBell LabsBell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
. - 1974, Graphic Systems partners with Singer CorporationSinger CorporationSinger Corporation is a manufacturer of sewing machines, first established as I.M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac Merritt Singer with New York lawyer Edward Clark. Best known for its sewing machines, it was renamed Singer Manufacturing Company in 1865, then The Singer Company in 1963. It is...
to market the GSI C/A/T phototypesetter. Singer Corporation was allowed to put the Singer C/A/T logo on equipment they sold. - 1978, Singer Corporation gets out of the typesetting business.
- 1978, Wang LaboratoriesWang LaboratoriesWang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge , Tewksbury , and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts . At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over...
purchases Graphic Systems and continued to market the GSI C/A/T typesetter. for UNIX based phototypesetting. The phototypesetter was then to be known as the Wang Graphic Systems C/A/T. This allowed the phototypesetter to be available through the 1980s. - 1979, The ditroff software is created by Brian KernighanBrian KernighanBrian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK both stand for...
. - 1979, The TeXTeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
software is created by Donald E. KnuthDonald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
. - 1981-1983, The LaTeXLaTeXLaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
software is created by Leslie LamportLeslie LamportLeslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972...
. - 1992, Wang Laboratories declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
History
Bell Labs purchased a C/A/T phototypesetter in 1973 for their engineers who were developing the UNIX operating system. The C/A/T phototypesetter became the defacto standard for UNIX based typesetting. The early typesetting programs on general purpose computers were displacing special purpose photocomposition systems.Noteworthy typesetting software created for the C/A/T include troff
Troff
troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s...
(1973), which was developed by Joe F. Ossanna
Joe Ossanna
Joseph F. Ossanna was a Member of the Technical Staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey...
at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
. Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK both stand for...
later developed the ditroff (typesetter independent troff) program which supports the C/A/T and other publishing systems. C/A/T was the workhorse of UNIX printing through the 1980s for those shops that could not afford hot lead typography equipment or expensive and proprietary document typesetting systems. High resolution laser printing, now common in desktop publishing, was not yet available.
Graphic Systems did not have the marketing capability to satisfy the growing demand of the phototypesetting business. Singer Manufacturing Company around 1975 acquired the rights to market the hardware, including placing the Singer C/A/T logo on the products. Singer continued to support C/A/T systems until 1979. Graphic Systems was bought by Wang Laboratories
Wang Laboratories
Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge , Tewksbury , and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts . At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over...
in 1978. The phototypesetter was then known as the Wang Graphic Systems C/A/T with continued support through the 1980s.
Advances in the electronic typesetting programs like ditroff by Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK both stand for...
(1979), TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
by Donald E. Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
(1979), and LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
by Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972...
(1981–1983) finally allowed the C/A/T phototypesetter to become obsolete. The C/A/T phototypesetter continued to be prevalent in many UNIX based documentation shops until high quality laser printers became prevalent in the marketplace.