Linotronic 300

I’m guessing you didn’t Google Linotronic 300 manual (I apologize if you did). Several entries come up.

Wow. That’s ‘awkward age’ vintage. Did you happen to stumble across this in your searches?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Linotype-Linotronic-300-330-Laser-Imagesetter-Ma...

Did it come with a RIP running on Windows?

Thanks for your responses! Keelan, that ebay link is very helpful. It did not come with RIP software. I know very little about it, so was mostly posting here to see the community’s feedback.

Out of curiosity I’ve been digging around a bit more. It turns out that there is a company that provides support for the Linotronic 300:

http://www.xitron.com

You’d have to pay for their software, and an interface card or box, but I found a doc that lists the 300D (same thing?) as a supported device:

http://www.xitron.com/downloads/support/technical_documents/plugin_manua...

It looks like the 300 uses a combined SCSI-1/Serial interface, so you’re looking at an adventure at the very least. This stuff is fascinating to me — my first contact with the technical side of printing was reading about imagesetters in MacWorld and MacUser magazine when I was not yet even a teenager. I remember being blown away by these things that could rasterize 2400 DPI images, when most home users had dot matrix printers. Those that could afford laser printers were still most likely limited to 300 DPI output.

I am going to jump in here with what I remember. I worked in and managed a prepress shop in the 1990s. We had a 300, 330 and 530.

Seems to me that the 300 was low-end and could only output 1270. The 330 and up could do both 1270 and 2540DPI. I think we had an AGFA interface from our Macs. but the RIP was built into the Lino. Strictly old school and replaced by newer RIPS by AGFA and others.

Even if you get it working, you will have to have a film and paper processor to develop the film. It makes me and others appreciate lasers and direct-to-plate. Don’t mean this to be a downer but it is old technology, interesting but hard to use without spending money.
-Mike

I used to babysit a 330 back in the day, amongst other things. I dimly recall it having a standalone Linotronic RIP of one flavor or another with some oddly proprietary cabling connecting the two. I may be conflating that with my Scitex experience though.

I remember cursing that thing though, on a couple of accounts. First, nearly every time I left a long job to output overnight, it would invariable issue a postscript error and crash, ruining many feet of film. Second, the air was not well filtered in the prepress department, so I’d have to strip the thing down once a week to clean the mirror. hated doing that as I knew I’d be blamed if I screwed it up, even though I had no business servicing the guts of that machine.

For what it’s worth, there are two packages of RIP software and PCI card for the Linotronic 300 on eBay right now. One is Xitron for Windows, and the other is Ultre/Harlequin for Windows or PowerMac (with dongle).