History of first use of allcomputerized typesetting 3297

On Sat, 29 Apr 06 11:43:09 GMT in alt.folklore.computers,

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And no human corrections were necessary? OCR machines of the time required human confirmation or correction of about 1 out of every 10 *characters* on perfect copy.

And the spell checking and changes required no human input?

Don't think so! From "The Elements of Programming Style", by Kernighan & Plauger: "Copyright (c) 1978, 1974..." "This book was set in Times Roman and Courier 12 by the authors, using a Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11-70 running under the UNIX operating system."

Presumably the latter paragraph applies to the 1978 K&P 2nd ed. as the K&R 1st ed. (also 1978) has the same paragraph.

"PREFACE to the First Edition" (1974) of K&P last para says: "We were able to type the manuscript directly into a PDP-11-45, edit the source, check the programs, and set the final version in type -- all with the help of a uniquely flexible operating system called UNIX."

I talked to some companies using OCR in the mid 1970s in Glasgow who were interested in buying our *r*off-alike package for reformatting and output: some of them must have done this before 1979.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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