The WRPI Thing

In the late 60's and early 70's, commercoial radio stations in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area all had their music surveys printed and available at the various record stores in the Capital District. So WRPI published the The WRPI Thing to get noticed in those same record stores. In the pre-personal computer and laser printer era, this was no small feat. Producing justified, camera-ready copy for the offset printing process required hours of careful typing on the station's red IBM Selectric typewriter with its proportional font typeface ball in place. To make a neatly justified column, you typed text between two pencil lines on the page, being careful to stop at the end of a word just before reaching the line on the right margin. Then you measured to see how many additional spaces you needed to distribute between words on the line to have the text just reach the right column margin. You jotted that number down at the end of each line. After finishing a page, you re-typed the whole thing, adding the extra spaces required in each line as you went.

The goal was to produce The Thing monthly, but that didn't happen. We're not sure how many issues were produced, but we know how many we have here in the Radio Museum: 9. If you have one or more that we don't, we'd love to get copies of them. Please use the "Contribute Items" button on the home page to upload them.

November, 1968

December, 1968

May, 1969

December, 1969

January, 1970

April, 1970

May, 1970

November, 1970

December, 1970