Datalantic was an electronic typesetting company originally located in Atlanta, Georgia. The company relocated to Stuart, Florida some time after 1983. The company was sold in 1992 at which time it effectively ceased to exist. (Note that the company's name left out the first t in Atlantic.)
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and other symbols are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts. One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission.
The company played a role in two important facets of American history. In 1981 Datalantic was contracted by Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Fund (VVMF), to collate, re-case and ultimately typeset the original set of 58,159 names that appear on the United States National Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Such a typesetting project was no small feat given the technology that existed in 1981. Datalantic had a Computer Automation mini-computer with what, at the time, was considered a very large 80 megabyte hard disk. The mini-computer was connected to an Alphatype CRS typesetting device. The data was supplied by the Department of Defense on a 9 track tape. Datalantic wrote custom software to facilitate the process. The software was written using the BASIC programming language. The process included reconstructing data to the specifications, adding typesetting commands making all the names cap size and sorting by date of casualty within a line and alphabetizing at the same time. The names were printed and sent to the Gold Star Mothers for proofing. Finally, the panels were typeset and sent to Tennessee for sand blasting.
Computer Automation Inc. was a computer manufacturer founded by David H. Methvin in 1968, based originally in Newport Beach, California, United States. It opened a sales, support and repair arm in the UK in 1972, based at Hertford House, Maple Cross, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. Later relocated to Suite 2 Milfield House, Croxley Centre, Croxley Green, Watford, Hertfordshire.
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix mega is a multiplier of 1000000 (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities.
The Department of Defense is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government concerned directly with national security and the United States Armed Forces. The department is the largest employer in the world, with nearly 1.3 million active duty servicemen and women as of 2016. Adding to its employees are over 826,000 National Guardsmen and Reservists from the four services, and over 732,000 civilians bringing the total to over 2.8 million employees. Headquartered at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the DoD's stated mission is to provide "the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security".
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute to regulate interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. The FCC serves the public in the areas of broadband access, fair competition, radio frequency use, media responsibility, public safety, and homeland security.
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company, the second largest provider of mobile telephone services, and the largest provider of fixed telephone services in the United States through AT&T Communications. Since June 14, 2018, it is also the parent company of mass media conglomerate WarnerMedia, making it the world's largest media and entertainment company in terms of revenue. As of 2018, AT&T is ranked #9 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a 2-acre U.S. national memorial in Washington D.C. It honors service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War, service members who died in service in Vietnam/South East Asia, and those service members who were unaccounted for during the war.
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Computers and Typesetting is a 5-volume set of books by Donald Knuth published in 1986 describing the TeX and Metafont systems for digital typography. Knuth's computers and typesetting project was the result of his frustration with the lack of decent software for the typesetting of mathematical and technical documents. The results of this project include TeX for typesetting, Metafont for font construction and the Computer Modern typefaces that are the default fonts used by TeX. In the series of five books Knuth not only describes the TeX and Metafont languages, he also describes and documents the source code of the TeX and Metafont interpreters, and the source code for the Computer Modern fonts used by TeX. The book set stands as a tour de force demonstration of literate programming.
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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, a British company founded 1967 in Aldershot, UK that specializes in the production of photomasks used in the production of integrated circuits.
The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, when Jiří Zlatuška and Phil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas with Donald Knuth at Stanford University. Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
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Norsk Data (ND) was a Norwegian manufacturer of minicomputers which operated between 1967 and 1992. The company was established as A/S Nordata – Norsk Data-Elektronikk on 7 July 1967 and took into use the Norsk Data brand in 1975. The company was founded by Lars Monrad-Krohn, Rolf Skår and Per Bjørge, three computer engineers working at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment which had just built the minicompter SAM 2. ND's first contract was the delivery of a Nord-1 computer to Norcontrol. Initially in competition with Kongsberg, ND started delivering computers to Norwegian institutions. By 1972 the company had developed Sintran operating system, the 32-bit Nord-5 and a time sharing system.
