"They had green screens," recalls Henry Sicignano III '90, who served as business manager for two years.

Once edited, stories would be sent over a wire to a new typesetter, which produced the same columns of text as the punched-hole reader without the hassle of spools of paper.

"That was considered fairly complicated at the time," says Eric M. Candell '88, who served as The Crimson's first Manager of Information Services in 1987, and now works at Microsoft. "It wasn't something an individual would do in the privacy of their own home."

But there were still problems.

"If the computer went down, all of the terminals died as well," Candell says. "I remember frustrating hours when no reporters could complete their articles because of some shutdown of the type-setting system."

As time--and innumerable nights of french fries, cigarette smoke (since banned) and greasy pizzas--took their toll, the terminals began to deteriorate.

"They were sort of filthy," remembers Rebecca L. Walkowitz '92, Crimson president in 1991. "You could tell they had been around for a while--they had a level of residue of heavy wear."

By the end of the decade, computer technology had taken leaps forward, and the writing terminals were on their last legs. A building-wide renovation in 1991 provided the opportunity to begin anew.

Under the guidance of several executives--notably former Information Services Manager Michael A. Schoen '93 and Business Manager Elizabeth S. Hilton '92--a dozen IBM compatible computers were installed in the newsroom, along with Macintosh workstations for graphic design and layout.

All were fully networked, allowing a paperless transfer of articles from news-room writers to layout designers downstairs, who dispatched completed pages to a new $250,000 Linotronic (film) printer.

A Thousand Words...

Technological change came more slowly to the photo department.

Until the spring of 1995, photo editors relied on old-fashioned "screen" technology to convert photographs into black-and-white halftone patterns that could be printed onto newsprint. With the purchase of a scanner, which digitizes photographs into computer data, the paper took another step toward complete digital production.

Editors refined the process later that year with the acquisition of a scanner that could accept photo negatives, eliminating the need to develop prints.

"Getting a negative scanner easily cut an hour or two off production from a photo standpoint," says Tara Arden-Smith '96, an editor in 1995.