[cmdrriker]

A&M (later A&M Intl to sound more sophisticated) made some interesting equipment from its various divisions. Their Multigraph division long made duplicators for secretaries etc. They also introduced an office copier that sorta functioned like what Xerox came up with but minus the Xerographic process (sorta like a hybrid spirit duplicator on steroids). Like this one in this vintage ad: https://www.ebay.com/itm/274448810068. A&M's Varityper division produced some really innovative cold-type products and they were probably 3rd among the big names of the day CompuGraphic, Linotype (LinoTronic) with their Comp/Edit series of electro-mechanical typesetting gear. There was also AM Jacquard division which sold a word processing/editing setup that was seen to complement their typesetting division. I never saw one of those in person, primarily I was trained on the Varityper CompEdit and later digital version. Desktop publishing ended its existence as management didn't know how to integrate those systems into desktop publishing. Typesetting used to be an independent task, one would enter the text into a composition system where it could be edited and manipulated for page, letter, word, and character spacing depending upon the medium of output. DP combined all those functions and allowed you to WYSIWYG it before even printing it out. Linotype survived a little while longer with their system the Linotronic because they knew that essentially if they made a "printer" aka the imagesetter that outputs the films necessary for plate making they could eke out an existence (they're now owned by their longtime rival Monotype!).

I can still see in my head how to compose a line in the CompEdit, perhaps it was like a pseudo comp language in that you could specify line length, drop-cap, leading, tracking, kerning, etc all via commands. I guess the equivalent of WordPerfect's codes but with maximum strength.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_Jacquard_Systems https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273361... https://www.facebook.com/Varityper/ http://pdf.textfiles.com/jscott/1980-varityper-brochure.pdf