Compugraphic Corporation was an American producer of typesetting systems and phototypesetting equipment, based, at the time of the Agfa merger, in Wilmington, Massachusetts, just a few miles from where it was founded. This company is not to be confused with Compugraphics^[1], a British company founded 1967 in Aldershot, UK that specializes in the production of photomasks used in the production of integrated circuits.

Compugraphic was founded in 1960 by William Garth Jr. in Brookline, Massachusetts. Along with Mr. Garth, Ellis Hanson and David Lunquist came from Photon, Corp. at the same time. Shortly thereafter, Earl Fortini joined the firm. The first hourly employee, with a Clock Number 1, was Leslie A. Clark.

The first product developed was the DTP, the Directory Tape Processor, an electro-mechanical machine, the size of a small upright freezer, and sold to publishers of telephone books.

In 1963, Compugraphic moved to Reading and commissioned Massachusetts-based Wang Laboratories to develop the Linasec, a computer used to prepare justified punched tape to drive linotype typesetting machines which were widely used in the printing industry, which at that time was based entirely on hot metal type.

In the late 1960s, Compugraphic introduced the 7200 and 2900 photocomposition machines. Prepared by a computer, a tape would be fed into a phototypesetter, which would imprint type from a strip of film onto "ectamatic" (light-sensitive) paper, which would then be used for paste up.

In 1987, a U.S. patent for Intellifont, a system of hinted scaling computer fonts, was granted to Thomas B. Hawkins of Compugraphic.

In the trading quarter to September 30, 1987, Compugraphic reported revenue of some $92 million ^[2] In 1988, the company was acquired by the European image processing company, Agfa-Gevaert.

In 1990, printer and computing system manufacturer Hewlett-Packard adopted Intellifont scaling as part of its PCL 5 printer control protocol.

References

1. ↑ Compugraphics photomask solutions
2. ↑ COMPUGRAPHIC CORP reports earnings for Qtr to Sept 30 New York Times archive, first published November 2, 1987, accessed 17 November, 2007