Atex (software)

Atex is a company specializing in the development of advertising, editorial and web content management systems. The company was established in Massachusetts in 1973 and grew to become a worldwide hardware and software supplier to the publishing industry. It participated in much of the change in the print industry involving the move from hot-metal through photo and then laser typesetting, culminating in computer to plate (CTP). The company expanded to include web publishing as an integral part of its product line.

The company claims to have over $1 billion USD worth of software installed worldwide, and claims more than 1000 customers in 55 countries. The company is based in Reading, Berkshire, UK, and backed by Norwegian investment company Kistefos. It employs over 600 people globally.

Atex was founded in Massachusetts in 1973 by Douglas Drane and Charles and Richard Ying, graduates of MIT, who had an idea for a new type of electronic composition system. By 1974 they had created a prototype video display terminal, encased in a cardboard whiskey carton. The weekly news magazine US News & World Report was their first customer and an early investor.

By 1977, Atex had successfully connected reporters and editors via a paper-free system that allowed working on-screen instead of on typewriters. The system had a terminal-and-server paradigm, using modified DEC PDP-11 minicomputer hardware running a custom Atex multi-user operating system. Terminals were little more than keyboards, with the servers directly generating video signals for each terminal. The memory-mapped screen images were monochrome and not high resolution, but they could scroll quickly and fluidly without the constraints imposed by conventional serial data connections, which at the time were not very fast. The servers were paired for redundancy; each story saved to disk was written to two separate systems. The systems talked to each other across a high speed intersystem bus, making a set of up to 15 servers seem to their users to be one big system. A built-in messaging system provided email-like functionality among system users, greatly aiding collaboration. Wire stories were funneled into the system electronically rather than having to be re-keyboarded from teletype printouts. The workflow advantages of the system proved popular with staff and management of newspapers and large magazine publishers. The proprietary keyboards included a number of innovations which greatly facilitated text entry and editing.

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