Comments...

• I started as a typesetter on the Berthold Glass Grid System - TPU 3608. We could only set 36 pt type. Then we had the Berthold M Series Laser - now we can do reverse type, italics and the massive 72 pt. See what we had before the mac!
  29/09/2009 22:51:15 by Ian Butler
• My earliest electronic typesetting recollection was the Comugraphic machines. Tuned to a nats hair in the kerning and leading stakes. See http://bit.ly/gcVLD
  30/09/2009 11:20:35 by Richard Bridgwater
• Oh happy days! I wonder how many people out there still retain the old skills? Many the time I emerged from the PMT camera room just in time to avoid my trousers bursting into flame! If you relate these stories to a 20 year old Mac operator, they look at you as if you're from Mars! Great days!
  02/10/2009 00:00:00 by Nick Field (out of work Production Manager)
• I rescued a zinco of a Renault 11 ad from my desk when I left my first agency. As a Boy Scout, I had seen them setting the hot type at the Daily Express print works in Manchester. Those ads really were hot off the press!
  15/10/2009 00:00:00 by John Edwards
• You just described my first job out of school to a tee! Riley / Rex stuart Advertising in Manchester (Old Trafford). The scalpel and Steel Ruler being the worst combination. My Art Director would often be heard screaming across the open plan office at me, "Don't get your blood on the artwork"!
  18/10/2009 00:00:00 by Steve Birbeck
• The Agfa Repromaster, how we had hours of fun in a darkened room in the middle of summer with ridiculous temperatures. See http://www.drawger.com/show.php?what=shows&show_id=32&image_id=1679
  02/11/2009 00:00:00 by Paul Walker, Huddersfield
• Oh My! Talk about blast from the past... Remember grant enlargers... and walking about with masking tape stuck to your heel... or getting home and finding two letters of the text you had been pasting down stuck to your elbow... or the client wanting to see all that hand traced headline text colored - green... Ah, nostalgia!
  04/12/2009 00:00:00 by Carole Davis
• I started out as linotype operator/compositor (hot metal) for all you young ones, before in 1979 moving onto my first typesetting machine a compugraphic single line display machine with tape at the end which was then fed into a processor before you could get a sheet of film with text on it then to am varityper machines, to the Berthold M series and then the inception of the mac which then involved saving everything onto disc as the hard drives were too small at the time with drum roll scanners, letraset still abound dark rooms with cameras (not small ones) but the size of a room, with three baths to process the pictures before making up pages (do I miss those days) sometimes but the mac has made everything simpler. Good to see people still remember as it is gone now and no-one ever seems interested in the trade from the old days. Tam Glasgow
  20/01/2011 09:36:22 by Thomas Kelly
• MY God but this has taken me back. Went to art college 1983-86, (getting high under Grant enlargers with expensive Pentel markers - surely even drugs would've been less expensive for a student?) What was the name of that display type system with stencils that exposed 1 letter at a time onto a strip of paper, and you had to space each letter manually? Then I did paste-up artist work on local newpapers; Agfa Repromaster camera, darkroom with piles of orange boxes containing Agfa CPN and CPP paper, a chemical bath to feed the paper through and a washing line to hang the prints up on. Will never forget the disgusting taste when I ate my sandwiches having forgotten to wash the chemicals off my hands! Euchh. And the gungy melted block wax for pasting the ads. Could never get the ad sales ladies to understand proportional scaling - ie you CANNOT "blow up" something 2cm x 10 cm to fit 20cm x 4cm!!! They also used to send us photos to use in ads, usually managing to whack a gurt staple through the artwork in the middle of the person's face. Descreening is all very well but it can't hide that! Not as tricky as the process camera in my earlier work experience place: unlike the Repromaster you could not even punch in dimensions on a keyboard; you had to put a ruler on the glass and try and twiddle the 2 handles until the thing was in focus *and* the size was correct; getting 1 of these was difficult, it was almost impossible to get both! Scalpels; still use these. Bless my mum, she saw me cutting something out with the trusty 10A blade and could not stop herself saying "Be careful, that's sharp". I paused in silence and so did my dad - at what point does your mum have to admit you might be responsible for your own safety. After all I am knocking on 50 and have been using scalpels for 27 years now!!! Spraymount, oh yes. We used to get through so much of that. Sticky carpets and God knows what it did to our lungs! Just been watching "The Science of Sleep" and it brought all this back !
  12/02/2011 00:00:00 by Jade
• Interesting read! I'm currently studying graphic design and I came across this when I was looking up pictures of magic markers, to see what the original ones looked like! Also, my Aunty used to be a designer and she recently gave me a chest of drawers FULL of all this kind of equipment! (no magic markers though) There's lots of Rotring pens in there, but I couldn't get them to work. Maybe there's ink dried in the tips? I was hoping someone here might have tips on how to get them working? Anyway, back to my homework ;)
  16/06/2011 08:22:41 by BeckyB
• I didn't go the computer way! Had a look at it but disliked it intently. I've been illustrating since 1986 and still use CS2 (or its equivalent as its getting hard to find) winsor and newton series 7 brushes and designers gouache. Yes I have a light box, yes I have an airbrush and compressor and yes I have a grant enlarger! I'm the last of the dinosaurs. Still making a decent living at it. Does anyone know where I could get a sheet of A0 CS10 or similar
  22/08/2011 00:00:00 by Paul OSullivan
• I still miss my cow gum tin and the smell of solvents!
  11/10/2009 00:00:00 by Caroline Smith
• Even with Macs things took ages! We had 1 mac that had photoshop on. We all had to queue up and wait to get on it, don't even get me started on scanning!!
  05/11/2009 00:00:00 by Simon Derbyshire
• Thanks for commenting on my blog. Advice on cleaning Rotring pens. I guess that there is a chance they aren't cleanable now after what must be 20yrs +. The way we cleaned them at the time was to unscrew the nib from the pen barrel, then unscrew the small cap at the opposite end to the nib, which would reveal a little barrel inside. Carefully pull this out which, revealing a fine wire on the other end of the barrel. Run this under some warm water, as with the nib itself to clean out any dry ink. The tricky task is then to reassemble without bending the wire, gently feeding the wire back into the nib housing until it slips into the nib shaft itself. From what I` can remember this was a workable method for pen nibs as fine as .25, however it was a known fact that it is was more or less impossible reassembling a .18 nib as the wire simply bent as so as you put it back. Rotring v/ Marsmatic pens drying up was a common reoccurring situation if left for too long. Anyhow I hope this helps, although I would make sure you concentrate on your Mac skills first as a graphic design tool.
  16/06/2011 00:00:00 by Richard Bridgwater