Berthold typesetting systems

The German company H. Berthold AG was founded in Berlin by Hermann Berthold in the year 1858.

As a typefounder, Berthold had no background in producing typesetting machinery until the introduction of the Diatype in 1958.

Diatype

The Diatype was a relatively small desktop-sized headline-setting device (i.e. not intended for continuous justified text), based on a glass disc font master. Character selection was by means of a trigger mounted on the front of the machine (giving rise to the colloquial naming of the machine as the "duck-shooter" (in the UK at least).When changing font, it was a notable feature of the machine that it required calibration of letterspacing by the typing of a nonsense character sequence beginning "Hillimillihirtzheftpflaster...".

Diatronic

Berthold Diatronic systems were based on a glass grid master of each font weight, composed on a code-driven sysem. A marching-character display provided editing capabilities only to the line currently being composed.

Berthold ADS (Akzidenz Dialog System)

The next incarnation of the Diatronic system was widely adopted in the high-quality ad setting trade in Europe. Its major advantage was fine control of typography thanks to continuously variable optics, allowing fractions of point sizes to be specified.Operator feedback was by means of a green-screen CRT showing code mnemonics only, it being left to the operator to visualise final output.Keyboard operation was innovative, utilizing many keys with a single legend, such as , , , , etc. System operation was therefore effected by a combination of keys, such as , then to save a file.

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