Yeah, the OP writes "And before you ask: no, the contents of the morgue aren’t digitized…" A lot of the morgue has been; I saw a presentation a few years ago at a Strata Conference. What is true is a lot of the digitized materials aren't available to the public because the Times doesn't have to rights to do so.
They just painted over the background around the subjects, for easier compositing later on. These days it's like a long press on your iPhone, but back in the day clipping was a tedious task.
Some newspapers in the 1970s used the Atex publishing system. The now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, a daily, used it when I worked there, roughly 1978 to 1980. The Atex system there relied on custom terminals--that is, supplied by Atex, not off-the-shelf from another manufacturer--and Atex terminals could be among those shown in the screenshots. Unfortunately, I don't remember much about how the Atex terminals looked, and (call me lazy) I haven't looked for photos.
Hmm. It looks like there are a couple of different models there.
I can't make out the specifics too clearly but they don't look to my eye like standard minicomputer terminals like DG would have sold. There are too many extra blocks of keys and lights.
FWIW, a few years later, the Post brought in a system that Raytheon designed for them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/10/06/p... So I'm guessing they're something either custom or from one of the early phototypesetting companies. This is pretty early days though. It was very common in the late 70s for editorial at small papers to still be working on typewriters and the final copy was re-inputed into phototypesetting equipment.
> So I'm guessing they're something either custom or from one of the early phototypesetting companies.
That was the clue I needed. I think I found a brochure describing somewhat later models.
The AM Verityper Comp/Set 4800 area composition terminal seems to have the same font and similar graphics capabilities of the integrated-keyboard terminal in the close ups:
The student newspaper I worked for in the late 70s, we did all the front-end writing and editing on (manual) typewriters and then production staff typed into a big terminal that could output paper tape for the phototypesetter. It looked a lot like that ULTRASystem photograph. Pretty sure I remember the trackball.
(It may also have been hooked up directly through some franken-mess of an Imsai 8080 and other stuff.) Don't remember the details and I never used it directly. Headlines were typed into a different system.
Then everything was pasted up on a light-table.
I think we shot the negatives ourselves as well.
At the time, infrequent publications had someone like ourselves do the production work for them or farmed it out to some local company.
> It looked a lot like that ULTRASystem photograph.
I was a little confused, before I realized that name only appeared in one of photos. After trying to resolve my confusion, I found this, which appears to be a document from 1985 enumerating all these types of systems then in existence:
The hardware is different than in the movie, but the software appears to be similar.
Scanning the document, I saw a mention of Interleaf, which some people at my employer were still using until recently (http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/Interleaf.htm). The comments on that page about the file format ring true, since we decided to not even try conversion and just have the users re-key their documents into our home-grown system for that content.
Compugraphic was another big company at the time. I think that was the manufacturer of our headline producing machine. (Another organization on the same floor used a much older and more manual machine for doing display text.) Don't know the system that did the body copy output.
Data General made some graphics display terminals. Judging from the rows of extra function keys they look very similar and some of the backend hardware also is DG.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/insider/in-the-timess-mor...