As described in Camex part 2: The Compugraphic AdVantage, Camex sought to leverage Compugraphic’s manufacturing expertise to create workstations for the high end of the newspaper market. The hardware change was minimal: replace the CG dark-blue metal housing with Camex light blue, replace the CG logo with a Camex logo. The real changes were in the software and microcode.
The AdVantage had a zoom feature implemented in microcode, allowing the user to zoom in incrementally to 2x scale for fine work. I worked at Compugraphic’s development facility in Haverhill, Massachusetts for a few months adapting the microcode to zoom out to 2x as well, thus enabling a user to see a full broadsheet newspaper page (17"x22") on the screen at once, though not at actual size. Meanwhile, my colleagues at Camex adapted the AdVantage version of our software to handle the larger size, and we started selling them to newspapers and other customers.
A Camex 1351 being demonstrated at a trade show
There were several different products, with different product names and numbers. My memory is hazy, but they went something like this:
- Camex 1350: No microcode change; supported only tabloid-size pages, but supported non-Compugraphic typesetters
- Camex 1351: Microcode change; supported broadsheet pages and diverse typesetters
- Camex 1352: Full-page layout software
- Camex ProFormer: software improvements to design and layout forms like tax returns.
- Camex Letter Input Processor: a system for designing fonts, used by Bitstream
These were sold to a wide variety of customers, including:
- Atlantic City Press
- Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
- Sacramento Bee
- Washington State Printing Office (ProFormer)
- Taylor Publishing Company
Of these, perhaps the most notable was Taylor Publishing. They publish about 70% of all school yearbooks in the US. This is a very seasonal endeavor since most schools want to submit finished copy at the end of May and have the finished books in hand by early June. Their big problem was that they needed to produce proof copies of every page before final approval, and using a phototypesetter for that purpose cost about a dollar per page in photographic paper (containing silver) and development chemicals. Camex was able to produce proofs on a Versatec electrostatic printer for about three cents a page; that savings in consumables easily paid for a Camex system that was in the $1 million range. In addition to eight 1351 workstations and multiple Versatec printers, there was a database system consisting of dual PDP-11/34s running CAMEXEC and dual 300Mb Control Data storage module drives. That was the beginning of the Page Element Data Base or PEDB product. (CAMEXEC also supported the 80Mb drives, but not at Taylor.)
During this period, I was still a jack-of-all-trades, writing code, debugging software and hardware, helping ship, install and service the product, and working trade shows.
Next up: Camex jumps into the imagesetter market.
