When I was at Windows Magazine, my editor Mike Elgan threatened to write a macro that automatically cut the first three grafs (paragraphs) of every story I wrote. He called them “throat clearing,” which, I admit, has been my only bad writing habit. In any case, the throat clearing (or exposition as they call it in the script-writing business) is now over. We get to my personal experiences in the long-dead world of typesetting.
Although the Beech Street Bugle attempted justification with a typewriter on mimeograph masters (look it up), it was very difficult and looked ugly. But a straight right edge, in 1964, screamed “professional news.” I could have this column justified, but I decided it’s the 21st century, so, no.
My first experience with real, automated justification came at MIT in 1970, during the nine months I worked at Ergo, an alternative Objectivist weekly newspaper at MIT.
Every classroom and activity at MIT had a teletype terminal with a daisy wheel printer connected to the time-sharing MULTICS mainframe. There was a word processing program (a what?) that produced justified text (with a little help from the operator). The Volkswagen of typesetting.
Then I switched to MIT’s real newspaper, The Tech, which drove the Rolls Royce of typesetting, the IBM MT/ST.
The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.
Comments
By the time I joined The Tech, we were in the last year of TREE, Mike McNamee's senior thesis IIRC. There was a big, red button labeled "KILL." You pushed it, and the computer hyphenated and justified ("HNJ") the text file. I never learned TREE and didn't learn to Night Edit until we had installed TEN -- the Atex front-end system used by The Boston Globe. I did have the honor of using TEN to put out the last issue produced on the Pacesetter Mark I photo-typesetters. We needed an RDII box to get TEN to talk to the Pacesetters, which had to be cleared after each file. So of course I pasted a sign on the box, "Flush After Use" (in 36pt Universe Ultra Bold Expanded, I think).