Linotronic

The Linotronic

graphic artists to cheaply set type that exceeded the quality of many phototypesetting systems in use at the time. Although too expensive for homes or most offices, but cheaper than many other alternatives of printing, it was the graphic designer's dream: output by taking a PostScript file on a removable disk to a service bureau

for output on the bureau's Linotronic.

Manufactured by

Apple Laserwriter

(succeeded a few months later by the LaserWriter Plus).

Adobe's RIPs have, generally, been named for United States rockets (Atlas, Redstone, etcetera), but Apple's RIP was of its own design, and was implemented using remarkably few integrated circuits (ICs), including PALs for most combinatorial logic, with the subsystem timing, DRAM refreshing, and rasterization functions being implemented in very few medium-integration PALs. Apple's competitors (i.e., QMS, NEC, and others) have generally used a variation of one of Adobe's RIPs with their large quantity of low-integration (i.e., Texas Instruments' 7400 series) ICs.

The latest RIPs are stand-alone fast PCs executing an x86 implementation of PostScript, with a special video output interface to the imagesetter.

References

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