Addressograph multigraph
Addressograph Multigraph (AM) was one of the first manufacturers to replace lead type in Germany with photo typesetting machines at the end of the 1970s .
Similar to Commodore, AM was taken over several times by various managements and thus also broken up. The initially largely dominant market shares were quickly lost through competing companies such as Berthold Fototype alias Linotype etc.
Technical
The machines consisted of two units, the workstation with screen and the exposure unit connected to it. The exposure unit consisted mainly of a writing disk rotating at 1600 rpm, on which the respective writing was, and a xenon flash , which was used to expose the photographic material.
On very sensitive and expensive (approx. 1700 DM) font discs there was usually a font (not to be confused with today's fonts) in the styles of bold and italics and their combination.
The first devices had punched tape as storage media , and from around 1978 8-inch floppy disks were introduced.
The material had to be exposed by hand and corrected after checking for errors.
There was no WYSIWYG control. All control commands for the exposure unit had to be entered manually.
Web links
- StampedOut.net - Info in English on the history of the group