Comment by larrys

"Sounds like a phototypesetter:"

You are correct. I owned one type - Itek Quadritek (another was Compugraphic). The fonts were essentially plastic disks. At the time (early 80's) each font was $40 (80's) dollars.

I later (about '86 iirc) replaced this with a Linotronic which was driven by not only a green screen front end (as described) but later the first Mac 128k (I think Pmaker 1.0 required 512k mac). The lino was $80,000 in 80's dollars approx iirc.