1968 – Scitex & OCR-A

Scitex is founded by Efraim (Efi) Arazi. It will become one of the most important prepress vendors for the next 30 years.

Efraim 'Efi' Arazi

Cossor (UK) and Hendrix (USA) are the first companies to launch photocomposition systems that have a CRT screen, allowing operators to see what they entered and correct mistakes.

The Itek 214 camera platemaker exposes print-ready pages directly to a non-metal printing plate. It makes plate making easy and is instrumental in creating the quick printing industry.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson mandates that all computers purchased by the federal government support the ASCII character encoding.

Source: Wikimedia

ATF releases the OCR-A typeface, a font that is optimized for machine reading and that meets the specifications of the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Its European counterpart – OCR-B – is designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1973.

OCR-A typeface example

Another interesting typeface created that same year is Syntax, designed by Hans Eduard Meier. It is one of the first attempts to go beyond the Swiss sanserifs like Helvetica and Univers by returning to the earlier humanist principles.

Syntax typeface example

These are some important or remarkable events from 1968:

  • In the Vietnam War the Tet Offensive begins with a series of surprise attacks by Viet Cong forces.
  • The Gold standard is abandonned. U.S. currency is no longer backed by a gold reserve.
  • The films ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Planet of the Apes’ are released.
  • There is civil unrest across Europe. Most notable are the Paris student riots and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
  • American civil rights leader Martin Luther King is fatally shot in Memphis, Tennessee.

<1967 – 1969>

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