Skimming this and thoroughly enjoying it, back in the mid to late 80s I worked in London's phototypesetting industry mostly serving ad agencies and others who needed high quality, quick turnaround type. I didn't work with Monotype, all Berthold, but it looks like they were all in a similar place.

Check out the Cold Type section on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Type_Foundry#Cold_T... . What was fascinating about this is it wasn't laser produced type, it came from a serious of glass grids and prisms. Laser output at the time was awful and nowhere near production quality but this prism-based output could only scale from 4pt to 36pt(? or somewhere thereabouts). That said, because the type was photo perfect it could be put under a camera enlarger and blown up to over 96pt in the hands of a skilled operator.

More notable things, these machines couldn't set type on an angle so as you were composing you had to take into consideration giving the paste up artist enough dance room to work. Spell check? Nope.

The biggest one was it was all markup language and nobody really used visual rendering, you set it all in your head and sometimes you'd even get it right on the first try. There were visual rendering units but they were slow, inaccurate, and would _really_ slow you down in an industry where the faster you were the more money you made. This markup thinking made being creative with HTML tables a natural skill in '92 so it wasn't all for nothing.

The Mac finally got PageMaker, photo paper laser output became good enough, and the last Berthold machines I saw were Sun workstations where I got my first taste of Unix. Fancy expensive kit where the rendering was fast enough to be useful.

That's an example of a byzantine contraption that boggles my mind that someone created and actually works. I'm not saying I have anything better, but impressed with the concept that looks/size did not get in the way of just making the damn thing.

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