As described in Camex part 1: the Camex 135, the company had pretty much exhausted the market for $100,000 workstations. The idea and basic architecture was sound, as proven by the three big-city newspapers using the 135, but a way had to be found to produce a less-expensive solution to address a larger market.
Camex, still a tiny startup with probably fewer than a dozen employees, was in no position to manufacture workstations at scale. So they entered into a development and licensing agreement with Compugraphic (CG), which had a long history of producing relatively low-cost systems for the pre-press market. There were three important parts of that agreement:
- Camex licensed its architecture and software to CG, and agreed to work with CG on developing a low-cost version
- CG took on the hardware development and manufacture of the new version, which they named the AdVantage.
- Camex had the right to buy AdVantage hardware at OEM prices and modify it as it saw fit.
The AdVantage
The AdVantage was introduced at the June 1978 American Newspaper Publishers Association tradeshow. It was a hit, and at $30,000 a pop considerably cheaper than the Camex 135 but with most of the features intact. The principle difference was that it could only handle tabloid-size (11"x17") pages. With that limitation came a smaller, cheaper CRT and a smaller tablet, both of which reduced the cost signficantly.
The CPU was an LSI-11. The vector display was designed by CG, undoubtedly with fewer bells and whistles than the Adage unit, again saving cost. It included a 2901-based micromachine to run the display. There were two floppy drives, one to hold the system software (no hard disk) and one for saving and restoring ads.
Fun Compugraphic fact, not about the AdVantage: one of their terminal products came in two versions: one which supported English and other left-to-right Western languages, and one that supported Arabic, a language that reads right-to-left. The hardware difference was trivial: they reversed the polarity of the X deflection coil on the CRT!
Next posting: the Camex 1350/1351/1352 series, based on the AdVantage but with microcode and software improvements.