Stamford Newspaper Completes Conversion

January 9, 1997

STAMFORD, Ct. - Click! With a quick, counter-clockwise twist to the key, Mike Scarborough, Manager of Production Systems for Southern Connecticut Newspapers Inc., today shut down the CSI - PDP11/70 computer, which had been used for the past sixteen years to produce the news and editorial content of The Advocate, as well as the Greenwich Time.

A small group of SCNI employees were present to mark the occasion which, despite its significance, passed quietly, unnoticed by the paper's journalists scurrying to meet the evening's deadline. Steve Harrington, Director of Information Systems, proudly labeled the proceedings "a non-event".

The calmness of the night was the end result of a carefully crafted technology transition plan which Harrington put into motion three years ago. Rather than the large, expensive and occasionally traumatic system conversion, which has been standard operating procedure for much of the newspaper industry, SCNI gradually replaced the old CSI terminals with Macintosh computers, group by group, function by function. "We always knew we would turn the thing off when one day, we realized no one was actually using it", said Harrington.

Scarborough added that the CSI system would have been turned off months earlier, except that CSI, unlike the new BaseView system, was capable of accepting input from the old TRS-80 portable computers, still in use by the paper's sports writers.

Also in attendance for the occasion was Robert A. Rosenthal of the consulting firm RAR & Associates. RAR, a Stamford resident, was the software architect and lead programmer of the CSI system, and had participated in the 1980 installation at The Advocate's then new building on Tresser Boulevard. CSI, which stands for Composition Systems Inc., was a leading vendor of newspaper systems during the 1970's and early 1980's. Though no longer in business, at its height some 200 newspapers around the world were produced with CSI technology.

What happens to that old iron now that the computer is shut off? Well, don't haul it away too quickly. SCNI still uses another old CSI system for the production of its classified pages, and the recently retired editorial computer will be retained for spare parts.