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Colin R Barber
Mathematician whose computer programs helped to bring about a revolution in typesetting
June 24, 1934 - September 16, 2006

ALTHOUGH Colin Barber worked in several branches of engineering, it was for showing what computer typesetting could be made to do that he will be remembered. The word processor on every desk is now taken for granted, but its development was crucial to the information revolution, and Barber’s work showed the way.

The word processor’s ability to cope with an added or deleted paragraph, or to reset type to fit a new layout, was the most obvious advantage, and this appealed first to newspapers — which have often been the instigators of change in the printing industry. American newspaper publishers were the first to experiment with computer typesetting, the Los Angeles Times adopting it at the start of the 1960s.

Other newspaper groups followed, and it was with the multi-title Perry Publications that Barber first became involved in writing the code that would allow machines to do what could previously only by done by skilled keyboard operators. He was then to become technical director of the team that brought the same technology to Britain — years before Britain was ready for it.

Colin Richard Barber was born into a working-class family in Hull in 1934. He had inherited an outstanding mathematical ability from his mother — numbers for him had dimensions and personalities — and read maths and physics at Hull Technical College for a London University external degree.

Mad about the sea, he joined the Merchant Navy, but at 19 he broke his back in an accident and was told that he might never walk again. After nine months in plaster, a stroll from Land’s End to John o’ Groats put paid to that fear.

He then worked as a stress analyst for manufacturers including de Havilland, Plessey and Avro Aircraft, which took him to Canada. Then came a move to SFK in Philadelphia, where he first discovered the power of computers.

In 1963 he joined Perry Publications in Florida as manager of computer typesetting applications. The field was expanding fast, as different publishers looked for people who could write programs to adapt their number-crunchers to process words.

In America the potentially huge impact of this on publishing had been grasped by John Seybold, who formed Rocappi (Research on Computer Applications in the Printing and Publishing Industries) and quickly signed up Barber.

In Britain, meanwhile, the book-printers Westerham Press and Hazel Sun were equally excited, and they became determined to lure Barber back to England. This they did in partnership with Seybold, by establishing Rocappi Ltd as a British company, with Rowley Atterbury as managing director. In 1964 a borrowed £165,000 bought them an RCA 301 mainframe computer with 20k of memory, and with this installed in a factory in Otford, Kent, they were ready to offer computing services to publishers.

The problems that Barber solved as Rocappi’s technical director were many and highly specific, since typesetting systems had not been standardised. One of the most elaborate was a hyphenation program, which instructed the computer how to break words at the end of lines without creating abominations such as “the- / rapist” or “disco- / ordination”. Rocappi wanted to match the highest standards in publishing, and this piece of software was designed to implement the hyphenation rules drawn up for Penguin by the famously meticulous Hans Schmoller.

Much of Rocappi’s emphasis, though, was on reference works and on automatically generated indexes. For these Barber created ingenious programs that could justify two or more columns of type simultaneously, so that whole pages could be set without the need to handle galleys of type.

Every large UK newspaper group visited Otford to marvel at what could be done, but the unions were to prevent them from using the technology for more than two decades.

In 1965, thanks to the enthusiasm of Lord Weidenfeld, Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone became the first novel to be computer-typeset. But perhaps this title was not a prudent choice. Although the technology was unrivalled in the UK, spare capacity in the industry at the time was driving down prices, and despite the support of the dominant conglomerate, the British Printing Corporation, Rocappi’s financial backers could not see sufficient profit. The company was wound up in 1967.

Undeterred, Barber set up a private firm in London, continuing his innovative work for a further 20 years. Initially C. R. Barber & Partners rented cheap computing time in the middle of the night on the mainframe IBM 360 owned by Blue Star Garages. There, Barber wrote programs to produce, for instance, a weekly bulletin for American Express giving the numbers of stolen cards, and the multivolume Dun & Bradstreet registers of company accounts.

Collins was a big client, and the firm created the settings for its many dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Barber had been the first to create a computer-set Bible for Collins in 1965-66. Another challenge, posed by friends as a technical teaser, was how to create the first computerised concordance to the Bible. He solved the basic problem in his head while walking on the beach at Brighton, after which he spent the rest of the weekend writing algorithms. The Concordance to the Good News Bible was published in 1976.

Barber’s operators were technicians who understood the programs they were using, but the manufacturers of typesetters now began incorporating computers that eliminated the need for this expertise. Barber’s firm provided tailor-made programming, but this was not what the future would want. As it turned out, the biggest profits were made not by selling technical services but by mass-marketing software packages. By the end of the 1980s, word-processing and layout functions were available in offices and homes across the world.

Barber had planned carefully for a secluded retirement, and closed his business in 1987. He and his wife, Vicki, to whom he was devoted, moved to the Isle of Man the following year, but their life was shattered when she developed cancer. He went to enormous lengths to find the best treatment, and never fully recovered from her death in 1993. He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage, to Ruth, and a son from his second.

Colin R. Barber, mathematician, was born on June 24, 1934. He died on September 16, 2006, aged 72