Making Light:  Typesetting:  when it changed ::: June 18, 2004, 08:10 PM

The internal workings looked like an orrery turned on its side.  The
system I learned on used mylar strips, one per font, that looked like
elongated photo negatives.

We got a Mergenthaler brand "Linofilm Superquick" machine as a tax
writeoff in 1972 or so.  It looked more like a windmill, with four
photographic glass plates for vanes.  Each plate had about 100
characters, and changes between roman, italic, and bold required the
windmill to turn.  At about 30 characters/second (plus a half-second
for each plate change) we couldn't call it "Superquick" with a
straight face, so we called it "Merggy".

Initially Merggy ran off paper tape, and managed to avoid the need for
memory by reading the tape for each line twice:  once to scan for the
number of spaces and the amount of linear space to divide up among
them, then back up to the beginning of the line and expose film on
the second pass through.  Later, we interfaced it to a computer so it
didn't need paper tape.  But the interface gave it the line, then the
line in reverse, then the line forward again, just as it would get it
from the paper tape.  I think we didn't have to give it the whole line
in reverse, though, just enough to tell it it got to the beginning of
the line.  Quel kluge, but it beat paper tape.

We set the Faculty Directory on Merggy from 1972 until at least 1976,
and I don't know how long after that.  I did get a chance to visit the
hot-lead plant that we inherited the job from, but I don't remember if
their Linotype machine was running at the time.