40 Years of Computing at Newcastle

Chapter 3 - Typesetting


Proceedings of the International Conference
on Computerized Typesetting

March 2 and 3, 1965

Research and Engineering Council of the Graphic Arts Industry, Inc.
Washington D.C

Keynote Address
C.J. Duncan,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: You know, of course, that the job of the keynote speaker is to soften you up for the rest of the conference. And this is really my job -- to get you lined up to a common baseline so we can have a fruitful discussion.

Before I get started I want to tell you how pleased I am to be here, and how grateful I am to the Research and Engineering Council for inviting me over. I reckon I have written to, or spoken to, or heard about almost half of you in the audience, so we ought to get along on fairly friendly terms if I don't say anything too outrageous.

You've heard a bit of how I got into computerized typesetting. Of course, the more I got into it the more I asked silly questions: and the more silly answers I got, the madder I got, because people wouldn't give me rational reasons for doing things. You find yourself changing into an "enfant terrible." You are asking quite respectable middle-aged sensible men why they're doing what they think are perfectly sensible and respectable things, and you finally get to sort of putting on some chain mail before you get into a printing hassle or talk to any printers. You then get started on the publishers, and finally you come back to getting started on the authors because you find really that you're the real cause of the trouble yourself. I've been an author myself, and I know that my sins are greater than all the rest put together.

Finally, you get to be humble and you think you've got to do a bit of imaginative thinking.

When I first thought about using computers, almost because I didn't like the price of a Justowriter, and I thought we could do it on our own computer, I went to the computing lab and asked the people there whether they would do a little bit of tape conversion for me. That was in '58. Data processing is now respectable. You can get a diploma in it. Equipment has changed and attitudes have changed.

However, it was about '61 before I really persuaded anybody to give me any money to pay for the work I couldn't do. Remember, please when I tell you about anything we've done at Newcastle that it is a team of five that has done the work, and I'm the least important. I just do the talking.

I found when we started -- or when I got around to putting pen to paper and getting some money in '60 and '61-- that the French had been before me. I don't think it is generally realized how much work Bafour and his team had done. They took their patent out in '55, so they must have done at least a year's work before that. My guess is that these British and American patents, as well as French, were known to the big computer people, and it was really a question of them lying fallow until the equipment or the economic situation of the condition in the industry was such that they wanted a new angle to help sell the computers.

I propose to try to describe a computerized system in fairly brief terms, and some of the basic concepts that go with it. Then I want to divide up the operations into the things that affect computerization, or the things that computerization affects, and discuss each one as far as I can.

It's essential that you should get used to the idea of a machine-readable medium; that is to say, something which a machine can operate on quite satisfactorily; and, as you know, this is tape. I've asked myself, and you must ask yourself, why the printing industry had tape all those years in the form of Monotype rolls without realizing what a gold mine they were sitting on. Especially is this so when they stopped coding with only two holes -- that is for a 15 by 15 matrix -- and went on to using more than two in a row because they were then immediately into the region where the coding was no longer essentially readable in terms of natural language but is in machine-coded form.

Code means a system of putting away information which is not the same as a natural language. It's tighter and usually it has less redundancy. Language is a remarkable thing, and it's this flexibility it has that makes it so difficult to handle.

We have to have a machine-readable form. You know this is punched tape. It can be magnetic tape. It can be cards. It can actually be anything which records mechanically in some one-to-one relationship what you in fact want to convey. It was first used for figures, but if you prepare a little table and write down figures alongside characters, you can put in anything you like. This is a mental hurdle which is not easy to get over to start with, but once you get over with it you realize you can do practically anything. If you ask if you can do this or do that, the real answer is that if you can get it into machine-codable form you can in fact do the operation.

I have labored that point a little bit. I don't think I really need to labor it half as much in America as in England. In America, when you go into a drug store to buy a book you get a punched card which tells you how to order another one automatically. In England, these things are not so well known; they are hidden away in offices and banks, and so on.

You all know that the great thing about computers is that they do arithmetic fast. What is difficult to understand about computers is that they can do things other than arithmetic fast. All our troubles with processing texts stem from this difficulty of imagining that a text is something that you can write figures down against; and, of course, you cannot do this with complete precision all the time.

The great benefit of applying computers to printing operations -- and this, of course, is true in other fields than printing -- is that it compels a rational and logical progression of thought; and it brings into the whole of printing work the systems concept: systems engineering -- the following of a thing through from "a" to "z" in a logical straightforward order. Once you get onto that particular bandwagon, your life is never quite the same. There is always an idea at the back of your mind that something that you're doing is irrational, something that you just took from your father and you've gone on doing it because it's the easiest way out.

This, unfortunately, is the canker in the bud. This is the thing that works at you night and day. And it isn't for some while, I think, that you realize that you've been living in a very errant world, that you've been putting up with inaccuracy, with unnecessary errors, and with other things that are draining away your income and draining away your energy from your primary task. It isn't for some time that you realize that the real effect of the whole of this business is to change the nature of your operations due to the difference in your error rates and your error correction techniques and all the other things that go into a complete printing system. You start stringing the steps out in a series of little block diagrams.

This tendency to look at the error rates and the way that you deal with errors during the whole of the manufacturing process (because that's what printing is) affects your thinking about the various stages of the process very powerfully, indeed. You come, of course, to the feeling that you need some standardization.

Standardization, in England anyway, is a dirty word when you mention it to a printer. But, in fact, what I really mean is rationalization -- such things as cutting down the number of different sizes and formats, although I don't think this is a necessary part of computerization; but it does mean a rational way of thinking about your task. And I think in the end we shall come to very generalized computer typesetting systems or computer-aided printing systems, and this will give us as much variety as we want.

My own opinion is that we are now at the threshold of the second age. We are over our first fumbling. We've got a better idea of what we want to do. We're ready now to take quite stiff decisions about the future -- the type of equipment we want and the way we want to operate. We're ready now to start acquiring real practical experience on the shop floor and through the whole process.

Of course, until we do that we haven't the faintest chance of getting a real idea of what the economics of the process are. Every time I ask our computer people to tell me how long it takes to do something they say, "It's too early yet. We don't know. We haven't itemized the programs. We're not doing things in the right order. Give us time."

Cost recovery in terms of computer typesetting is very easy to see in terms of the general purpose computer, the Linasec. You can do some intelligent sums, but I defy anybody to do the ultimate sums on the general purpose computer systems. We just aren't in that stage. You may think you are in America, but I question whether you are.

I want to show you very briefly the typical chain. You see what goes on between the typescript and the galley and the page proofs, and so on, which is all very delightful. It has a nice leisurely 18th-century air. You can get a set of proceedings out in about a year. This is why we all carry tape recorders around with us.

Of course, the whole system has become formalized, and each stage has a number of things which it must do, and lots of other things are tagged onto it. This whole accretion makes a printing system which is not necessarily inflexible but which has a certain number of grooves along which it very much likes to go. And woe betide you if you jump the needle out of any of these grooves before you have another groove ready for it.

From the correction loop you come down into the page proofs to final imposition and on to the production press.

There is a small step that is an important part of the whole process -- an errata slip. I wish I could say I've produced a took or even a pamphlet that didn't have to have one of those. You know it's true, and in striving for computerization we've got to strive to get that stage in earlier. If we do just that we'll have taken a big step forward.

I'd like to show you my original conception of the computerized typesetting systems. [See C. J. Duncan, "Proposed System of Type Composition," Printing Technology, vol. 5, no. 2 (November 1961), pp. 77-85.]

We have a man writing. He chooses some style and format instructions. They come out of a little box and go into the computer there. He puts in an encoded string of words or symbols. The publisher chooses what it's going to look like. The whole thing goes through and comes out as a book at the end.

You have your manuscript and your editorial instructions, which can also be on a tape and can be automatically selected by the computer program. You take in your uncorrected tape and your corrected tape, and they are merged into the final corrected form. This is a typical input chain. These are the original ideas I produced for the 1961 meeting of the printing technologists. The interesting thing to me is that these concepts are still valid. There needs to be a library of specific format instructions with rules which are for the language (i.e. English) and for the output system that we are working with or the type of text we are processing. We have various output instructions to suit the various output machines. They are checked and fed in and they make a complete program.

If you go to a full computerized type system [See figures 1 and 2 in "Look.' No Hands.'", The Penrose Annual, no. 57, l964, facing pages 122 and 123], you get involved in an intense activity at the input stage, getting the final input edited tape correct. You will find that you have done all your designing and planning of the book at this stage.

This brings me to the "first law" of computer typesetting: get it right at the start; otherwise you'll never get it right. Of course, this is a good discipline. There are many historic reasons why we have never done this before, or very rarely succeeded in doing it, but this is the thing you've got to do with computer typesetting.

Besides the final output tape, the composition tape which is being output by the computer, there can be a secondary loop which comes after the first edition and permits alterations or amendments -- all the things you didn't get right in your first input -- and you come down to your second edition. So, by the second edition you've got a chance of getting everything right.

I want to make some very elementary points, which have been made many times before. I don't really apologize for making them again. The difficulty in this business is that you must remember the important and elementary things when you're getting mixed up with all the technology. The important thing about computer typesetting -- the reason why it stays with us, why we'll never be able to shrug it off, why we've got to live with it, why we've got to make it work for us instead of us for it -- is that, we are producing tons of computer printer output and there are all sorts of reasons why this is better if it goes into proper printed form. I say "proper" because this is what all my printing friends in England say: "proper" printing.

There is an economy all around with proper printing. You know there is a gain because there is no re-keyboarding, so that you can have composition without keyboarding costs, which can be terribly important in short-run work. You know that there are no errors or very few errors in numerical data that comes straight off the computer. The first differential engine of Babbage, the first computer, was produced solely to print navigational tables free of error; and after all these years we've come to doing just that: printing outstandingly free of error. This has enormous economic consequences in terms of labor and in terms of what errors can do to a ship, say, if it goes in the wrong direction at the wrong time!

Less paper is used. It's easier to read. It's easier to comprehend, which is not necessarily quite the same thing. There is less chance of reading error. This is important, and it's often neglected. If you're reading a spare parts list out in New Guinea and you want a screw for a propeller and you get the wrong number -- then the aircraft doesn't fly. It has important economic consequences. You can't put a price tag on it, but it's there. So that machine-readable stuff that comes out of computers straight into typesetting is a vast new field of printing. And this is the tranquillizer I hand out to all my printer friends who are worried about losing business.

You can avoid re-keyboarding on some types of other work by being clever with either optical readers or mark sensing devices or eventually with voice writers. Our problem now is to find the practical way for getting this re-keyboarding done at an economic rate. I insist upon calling it re-keyboarding because it has been keyboarded several times usually. The real problem is error detection and error elimination because, as you know, it takes 10 to 20 times longer to correct an error than it does to type the original text. How can we make this process efficient and raise our input speeds? Unless we can get our input keyboarding speeds up this section is going to grow and grow and grow until it is bigger than the rest of the plant put together. We are going to be short of compositors, not have a superfluity of them.

The next thing we need to do, when we can get around to doing it logically and sensibly and economically, is to put the graphics in at the same time as the text. This scares some people. Now you sit and look at graphics on your television set all day long. We know that the technology is almost with us. Our real problem is welding the two together in a satisfactorily designed plant, and since we don't at the moment use a very satisfactory way of specifying design (at least we don't on the other side of the Atlantic, but it may be very much better over here), we've got that problem to face, too.

Here again you're a good deal more experienced than we are. In addition there are the problems posed by remote operation. If we are not all of us going to own computers (this may be possible in 20 years time when they only occupy the size of a suitcase), we have got to use other people's and we have got to use other people's in a way we can rely on and which they can't really interfere with. This means remote operation with remote transmission in a form which can be coded and error-corrected.

I want to put to you now the important part that design considerations play in the putting together of printed work. Every job has to be designed, and jobs have to be designed even when they're going into computer typesetting. At the moment we need to limit the range of designs which we use simply to make the programming problems easier.

But I do not consider (and I think you will agree with me that it isn't necessarily so) that computer typesetting systems are going to be limited designwise. In the end we shall write much more generalized programs which will give us quite a wide enough range of possibilities.

The difference will be between a completely infinite system of design, where you can have anything you like practically, and a limited system (several thousand different formats and styles).

The whole application of computers to the printing process will force us to specify what we're doing a good deal more closely, and we shall have to do what many of you I am sure are doing already: you're writing an engineering specification when you want to produce a piece of printed work. Well, you will write an engineering specification in computer terms, in a shorthand which the computer can understand and which it will reproduce for you.

This will give you some form of rationalization if it doesn't actually give you a full standardization. Let me give you an example. If you have six different things on a piece of printed work which you can change - - line length, page depth, type size, etc., and each one of these can have six variations -- you've got 720 styles immediately available to you, all different. You don't have to vary many of the things very much, you see, before a computer (which, after all, can store away far more than your mind can in a particular area at a particular time in recoverable form) can accommodate all the variations that you will ever need if you can only get them written down. You cannot, of course, write everything down because you will get a designer to come in tomorrow who will think of something new; but you can try.

I'd like to spend a moment or two talking about errors. You notice that I call them errors, because that is what they are. If they're alterations, you send a bill to the author for them, or to the editor. That's what you should do; this is what you haven't done in the past. The reason you haven't done it is because you've been making errors yourself and it's too much trouble to sort out whose fault it is in a particular case. Your machines and your men have been making errors, and because they've been making errors you've had to carry right through until the moment when you are practically ready to screw the job up and carry it from A to B and put it on the press -- you are prepared to fiddle about with it at the last minute. This won't do any more. We're going to have machines and human-being processes, we hope, which won't have very many errors in them. I won't say "won't have any" because statistically there will be some, if human beings are involved But you will have very few. Therefore, you've got no excuse for your previous bad habits, and you've got no excuse for encouraging your customers, the publishers and the authors, to fiddle about.

Machine malfunction having been reduced to a proportion which we can live with, the next thing you are going to have to do is get tougher (which you should have done long ago) with your publishers and your authors. You can tell me that I'm talking a lot of nonsense about getting tough with publishers and I don't know what they are like. But in the end, pounds, shillings, and pence count. You simply say to them, "Of course, you can have that. We'll take it down the road to Joe who sets by hand, and he'll charge you $20 a page. But you can have it from us as long as you bring us a correct tape for $2 a page.

You've been compounding a felony all these years by not charging everybody the right rate for their alterations. You've been penalizing the good and letting off the bad. You haven't been doing a proper social job in that respect. The lower the error rate, the less tolerable are any alterations, because once you get above 3 to 5 percent alterations you might just as well start the job over again when you're doing it with these highspeed machines.

I also feel quite strongly about computer manufacturers and people operating in this field, that they ought to be anxious to achieve some cooperation. It is silly for everybody to be rushing around doing the same thing. Some competition is a good thing to start out with, and maybe we need cut-throat competition at this stage now for a few years, but in the end I hope we will get to using the same computer language just as we mostly speak the same English language. After all, there will be a British-American language soon which we'll all recognize fairly well. I am managing to communicate today, I hope.

The future costs and speeds of computers are going to be very different. We are going to be able to afford fast storage. We are going to be able to afford to do lots of fancy things, and it would be a pity if, when the machine hardware gets to be cheap and easy to employ on our jobs, we were to be held up by lack of programs as we are in Britain now whenever we get a new computer. Soon we are going to be doing so much with computers that we will all be computer programmers if we are not careful, and we will certainly at that stage want to divide the tasks out. We need one editing program that will do for the whole of the printing industry of America and for Great Britain as well. There is no reason why we shouldn't all cooperate.

I know this is too far ahead, like the new computers and like the new programmers, but I expect we will be forced into that direction in the end. And it will compete with company selling. When you go out and buy a package deal from one of the big computer manufacturers, now you take the rough with the smooth, they'll tell you it's a good system, but don't believe too much. Be skeptical. Demand some real evidence. Put your own tests in and do your own assessment, and if you don't know how to do that, then learn.

Before you can ask a computer what you want it to do you've got to have some idea of what the difference is between a good, bad, and indifferent job. I must tell you quite candidly that you're not very good at specifying this. I find it very difficult to get any sort of consensus about what is a good typographical job. I read all sorts of design books. I talk to designers. I see them working. They have a feel for this and a feel for that. They frequently cannot reduce it to logical terms. I can't really find out what makes a really good book and what makes a really bad book. I have got some ideas, but they are really nicely stacked up in machine-readable form.

One of the reasons why we worked with Monotype at Newcastle was because the Americans had already done a good deal of work on linecasting. We were not very much interested in newspaper work, and we did not see any computers being introduced into newspaper plants in England for some while. Books to a large extent are only set on Monotype in England. In England we've got to be able to use the Monotype; practically every shop is full of Monotypes. It's not quite true to say that only one plant prints books with linecasting machines, but it is nearly true, or was reasonable true five, six, or seven years ago.

We have to get down to trying to define what it is about good typography that we want carried on. How are we going to carry it on into the new era? I put it like that because I know we are going to change, and we have to sort out our priorities. In the last resort, priorities mean money. When money talks you've got to decide whether you can afford something. You've got to decide what you can afford to put into the computer and you've got to know the styles that you want.

Organizational changes within the industry concern the balance between the existing functions of the author, the editor, and the printer. Traditionally this may be a good deal different in America from what it is in England, but I'm quite sure that the author has got to take on more responsibility for his material.

You will have some difficulty with some authors, but you've got a new generation coming up that you can train. It's always possible to change the world by getting at the youngsters, and it may very well be that you'll find young scientists and engineers rather grateful for the opportunity to have more responsibility for the shape of their work.

When you get down to the real process of writing texts, you can offer an author to get his book out quickly and accurately and without somebody fiddling about with his precious writing. It is really rather impertinent of publishers and printers to fiddle about with authors' texts the way they do. The authors nevertheless owe editors enormous debt because they actually put it into a form that others can read intelligently. This balance is a very delicate one. If you could only force authors to realize their responsibilities more by penalizing them for not doing so, and by making it clear that they have to write accurately and correctly from the start, you would start a revolution in that particular area. It will come to that, although probably the author will be the last person forced into the new system.

Just the same, the publisher and the publisher's editor and the man who marks up the stuff is going to have to change his habits. He is somewhat nearer to the man who is working the manufacturing process, so he will probably find it somewhat easier.

The whole process will have to be tidied up. The author and his editor will be responsible for the words and the sense. The publisher will be responsible for selecting the style and deciding the shape and the format and the edition size. The printer will be responsible for the manufacturing process. This is what the printer should do -- run a factory. If he imagines he's running a home for old women and all the other things that printers, in fact, do, then somebody is going to put him out of business one day -- I hope. Printing isn't just a way of life any longer. It's a business. It's a factory process.

I want now to talk to you about keyboarding. I want to fling a few figures at you. So far as I can find out, 6,000 key strokes an hour is not a bad average rate when you've got a stopwatch in your hand. In fact, for normal work with some degree of difficulty in it, 6,000 key strokes an hour seems to be considered a reasonable output rate. I think it is very slow.

When we keyed up one job ("Look No Hands.") on an IBM Type B input writer we found we could not exceed 6,500 even with a fast typist. The reason for this was we were mechanically limited on the keyboard. There was a mechanical lockout system, and if the typist went too fast, she skipped a character, and this so upset her that she slowed down.

We then tried quite an extensive test on the Dura Mach 10. On the Dura Mach 10 we were able to work for 31 hours, which was a reasonable task size, with a high accuracy, with a medium speed typist. This was, of course, only one test. We were able to come out with a net rate of 10,000 key strokes an hour. This is just about getting respectable. All sorts of people tell me, though, that this is slow. The TTS people say they can get their operators up to l4,000 key strokes an hour. But I'm only interested in all day, everyday 85 percent workload, 40-hour week. That's the net figure that I want. I'm not interested in how fast a good operator can go for a few hours. We have figures to show that they can go well over 20,000 an hour.

However, there is some evidence that a skilled touch typist who is being paid on incentive and who is sitting comfortably with everything handed to her, and if nobody gets in her way, can get up to 20,000 an hour and keep it up. That's the sort of target we have in mind. And you know (indicating the stenotypist), he's doing a lot more a lot faster. I suppose I'm speaking at 200 words a minute? That's 1200 characters a minute, or 72,000 key strokes an hour he's putting into his equipment there.

We have to do something about keyboarding, and all sorts of things have been suggested. I think the hope lies in a machine-readable form of this (indicating the stenotype machine), and as I understand it, several American organizations (Itek, IBM, Stenotype) have been working on this.

So far as we can tell, if we are going to get those speeds from stenotype keyboards into machine-readable form we are going to need the storage facilities usually associated with a fairly large general purpose computer. So we will not be able to afford to do it until perhaps the next generation of computers comes along, except in very special circumstances when either money is no object or the project is so urgent that this itself gives a great saving.

I want to review with you the classical functions of the galley proof and the page proof. What does the galley proof really do? What is it for? I can tell you what it always did do. It did mainly one thing: told you about house errors which you corrected. It also gave you an opportunity to tempt the author from the narrow path of rectitude into altering what he had already written down.

Why did he want to alter it? Because you gave it to him in a different form. Because he saw it in new eyes. This is important. This is the psychological effect of changing the shape and size of a piece of typescript. Giving it to him in a different form, then, is important, if you want him to make alterations. But, of course, what he ought to have is a special changing typewriter in his organization for typing it a different line length, a different shape, and so on, so that he can detect his errors in his own house; so you can get rid of that particular psychological operation in a high proportion of his work. But you can do it in that way. So let's separate that out and say that that's a definite function of the galley proof.

We will not need it, then anymore for house alterations or corrections because we're not going to have very many, or we don't need it necessarily in hot-metal form or the galley proof form. This is why I think that hard copy as produced on typewriters probably can serve that particular function of correcting the input string. It does not necessarily do a thoroughgoing job because it can only do the job up to the stage at which you correct it.

The controversy about whether you should use blind keyboards or hard copy keyboards is going to be around the industry for a good many years, no doubt. The only reason we have blind keyboards at the moment is because that is all we could have. Now if somebody had been inventing keyboarding machines with suitable typewriters available, he would put a hard copy in. Lift your imagination up above the conditions that applied when your fathers were buying machines. All of us are machinery-limited, and about one generation behind. We build our whole life on conceptions which are conditioned by the machinery which we were brought up with. Try not to be conditioned in this respect. Have some hard copy if it's only to tell you where you stopped when you went off to have your tea.

Now, do you or do you not need a page proof? The general consensus is that with large quantities of imaginative work you could do with a page proof. There is no doubt about it -- the page proof is a very useful production control medium because it tells you where you're going to put all your pages. Of course, this is assuming that you're going to impose them and print them in flat areas of 32's or 64's in the future. I personally don't believe this a bit. I cannot wait for printing machines to change into what I call a rational form where you don't have all this folding to do, which is a very difficult thing to do with flat sheets. And, if you remember, if you're a designer you have all this trouble with the thickness of the book. So I want to see printing done on very fast webs, lots of them being concentrated up at the end and ganged together. This is a rational way of printing, and if you can have an endless belt for your plate which has the whole book on, you only put on the plate when you're going to print it and you take it off afterwards and use it for the next job, then we've got a much more rational system. This isn't new; somebody else has thought of this.

Please do not be machine-limited in thinking about the stages that you want. You'll need a page proof at the moment if it's only to tell you that you've got a page upside down or you've dropped a few lines, or something of that sort. Of course, it would be better if the page proof looked like the final job. That's just a matter of economics, as to whether you can afford it. I say that by using computer typesetting systems you're probably out for something different. Personally, I don't very much like computer printout as the page proof but I am quite sure that if somebody said I could get it much cheaper that I would accept it and work with it. The human mind is a wonderfully flexible thing. It can look at a page of computer printout and see it as a page of finished type. I know quite well all of you can be trained to see it instantly. You're doing exactly that sort of thing all day long, but don't necessarily realize it. You just don't want to retrain yourself. You are reacting as if you were old. But nobody is too old to change his habits, and nobody is too old to retrain.

The page proof may be made on a line printer, or may be on a chain printer, or may be on a Xeronic, or may be on an SC 4020 -- these are only interim solutions anyway. All of us, of course, pin our faith in the fast operating mode on the new photocomposers. These we are told are the machines that are going to give us the thing which almost looks like a proper page proof. When you get a magnifier out it won't look quite good enough, but we may have to put all our magnifiers away for a year or two and just look at texts with our ordinary eyes like ordinary human beings.'

As you know, we're all interested in automation past just the setting of texts. We're all interested in pulling pages and imposition into a logical system. Obviously this is one of the most logical things we do. We do have to arrange the pages on the stone in various orders. We do have to turn some upside down. We do have to get the gutters and the margins and everything else right. If we're going to use fast photo-composers we can just write a few extra instructions on the controllers keyboard and the computer will do it for us.

We've got enormous gains to make here. We're going to convert a hand process into a fast and rapid machine process. You begin to fit it all together. It's a sort of jigsaw fitting of all the parts together which is the attraction that computerization has for people.

[Mr. Duncan then showed a number of examples in slide form including the following: scientific tables of wavelengths from NBS, sample settings of Chemical Abstracts, Photon setting of chemical formulae, stock exchange quotations and lists, union list extracts by Dr. M. Barnett, Navy stock lists, telephone directory setting, product and industry directories, and finally a page from "Index Medicus" set on the Photon Zip Model I.]

This will remind you that the big breakthrough of which you're going to hear again in information processing or information engineering is the "Index Medicus." This is one of the sample pages set on ZIP, Model I at 300-400 characters a second.

Now I will try to draw all this together. It is quite clear that we need more engineering specification and expertise at the outset. We've got to train ourselves up to writing things in precise form. We need designers who are mechanical designers as much as print designers. We've got to reorient them. But most of all, we need imagination. We need the imagination to break ourselves from all this dead weight of tradition.

We've got to break ourselves free of this so that we're ready for the future opportunities, and I can't emphasize too strongly that I feel that what we've seen so far is nothing to compare with what will come This is what we've always got to remember -- if somebody tells you you can't do something, don't ask "why not"; just say "we'll be able to do it next week," or next month, or next year. It's only the rate at which things are coming that we can't predict. It's easy as pie to predict that anything which can be logically stated as a requirement will eventually be met. This is an article of faith. I never question it. I don't know the timing, and neither do you. So if you've got patience, if you've got persistence, if you've got perspicacity, if you've got a sense of proportion and a sense of honour, you'll maybe get by.


Typesetting Index
Extract from "Rake's Progress or Inocents Abroad" (C.J. Duncan)
Contents Page - 40 years of Computing at Newcastle
Typesetting: Keynote Address - C.J. Duncan, 10 July 1997