"We never held the paper to cover home basketball games," said Robert Cullen, who was editor-in-chief in 1970-’71. "We only printed four days a week, but we would still report on a Saturday football game in Tuesday’s paper as if no one knew what happened."

At the University Print Shop, a crew of press workers, including several who were deaf-mute, composed the paper on hot lead Linotype machines, which were invented in the 19th century.

In 1964-’65, the only CD presence there was proofreader Douglas Jordan.

"The press workers would run a proof sheet, and I would mark it up," Jordan said. "These were sharp guys, just not able to talk or hear. We communicated via proofreading symbols. They took great pride in finding something I missed."

By 1968, the paper would send over several editors to oversee the typesetting, but they were still on a tight schedule and without control, recalls Richard Gwathmey, editor-in-chief in 1968. "We were using regular union guys. They would set the stories while we waited. They assembled the entire paper while we told them what do."

Gwathmey remembers being impressed with the hot lead Linotype machine. "There were these huge ingots of lead that gradually melted in a hot pot. Then there would be a lot of clanking, and out would come a line of type." The lines of cast lead type would be painstakingly assembled into a large tray, along with headlines assembled one lead letter at a time.

The University Print Shop would prepare a white glossy of each page. These pages were then sent on to the Culpeper Star-Exponent, which still prints the newspaper today.

In 1968, the paper purchased its own composing equipment and said goodbye to the University Print Shop. Since Culpeper did not need the newspaper flats until midnight, Cavalier Daily editors not only achieved more flexibility and control, they also added several hours to their deadlines.

The change also allowed the paper to begin a Monday edition, though it was seen as a nuisance at the time. "We weren’t too interested in coming in on Sunday," Gwathmey said.

For the first few years, the Monday paper had a separate editor whose editorial views were often the opposite of the regular edition. The edition focused on features, with most of the copy written before the weekend. And students still had to wait until Tuesday to read about the Hoos’ latest gridiron failure.

"In 1969 we ran four pages a day, occasionally six. By 1972 we began five days a week on a regular basis; usually six pages, occasionally eight," said Steve Wells, who was editor-in-chief in 1972-’73. And as the pages began to carry more serious stories, the focus of the staff became more serious also.

"This was an era when it changed from a fraternal, elitist extracurricular activity to a more responsible, professionally-run operation," added Wells, who took pride in being the anti-fraternity candidate.

"We typed our stories on yellow copy paper," recalled Wells. "We had two composition secretaries who would then type them into a composition machine. It would generate a magnetic tape reel that was fed into a machine that was essentially a glorified IBM typewriter." This machine printed out the text in columned format.

In a process known as cut-and-paste, the columns were cut with scissors, waxed on the back and then arranged on a blank page by hand. A separate machine generated headlines on a strip of paper that was also pasted onto the page.

Editors could see their pages before they were printed, and late corrections became possible. But something was still missing: photos.

"About once a week some photo mixup would occur," said Wells. "A photo would be switched, or just not there."

"We had to type within this red box on a page using a special IBM Selectric typewriter. Each letter you typed would have a barcode under it." An optical scanner would read the barcodes and generate a punched tape. The tape would be fed into a Harris mainframe computer.

"It had no hard disk, just large floppy disks about the size of old records," said Crichton.

Final editing would occur using Harris terminals, and then stories would be set by a Harris phototypesetter. It exposed a photosensitive film to each letter using a transparent font strip. The film was developed in a separate machine.

In Crichton’s year at the helm, the paper added several new Harris terminals so that stories could be directly entered into the system. The unreliable optical scanning system was happily retired.

"The old typesetter was strictly one font. If you wanted to change the font, or even use italics, you had to open it up and change a strip in the machine," Bass said.

With Maggie, "we could set a headline, a byline, a column logo, run it across three columns and leave a space for a photo," adds Bass. The layout could finally be done on a computer.

To do this required specialized typesetting codes. Unfortunately, this type of knowledge could not survive the newspaper’s constant turnover.

The Cavalier Daily invested over $50,000 in a new Compugraphics mainframe system, just missing the personal computer revolution that blossomed in the late 1980s.

"I still believe we made the right decision," said Greg Trevor, editor-in-chief in 1984-’85. Desktop publishing was not yet prevalent, but the current system was stifling the newspaper.

"The biggest difference was capacity," Trevor said. The old system could not even store a full issue. To typeset stories late in the day, early stories had to be deleted. The new system solved this problem. Copy was still output to Maggie, so cut-and-paste production was largely unaffected.

The collection of cheap PC clones and a 600 dpi laser printer arrived only a few weeks before the registration issue.

"The worst thing was that we were training while trying to put a paper out," said Kumar. "Back then, we barely knew anything about personal computers. We had to learn a whole new process."

Although rushed, the transition was necessary. Maggie was crashing too often for comfort, and the high costs of operating a phototypesetting system was a drag on the newspaper’s finances.

The focus of production now shifted from the cut and paste tables to two machines running PageMaker software, which allowed all of the newspaper copy to be assembled on the computer monitor before final printing. In later years, flatbed scanners and photographic negative scanners enabled the paper to digitize the graphic elements also.

However, the improvement in technology had an opposite effect on roll times.

"The computers just raised our expectations," said Kumar. Errors that would earlier have been tolerated because of the manually intensive work were no longer acceptable. Even at midnight with the courier stewing in the other room, a story might be ripped off the page for a single typo or a slight misalignment.

Ironically, this stressful year became a hallmark for Kumar.

"In November of 1994, we decided that the World Wide Web was starting to pick up, and that we wanted to be there. So I said I would have something ready by the time we got back from Winter Break," recalled Csontos.

Csontos bought a book about HTML and spent his vacation writing programs in the Visual Basic language that would convert an edition’s stories into web pages. After a teaser advertising campaign, the site was unveiled in January of 1995.

"That first week, I would stay up all night doing the web issue," said Csontos. "Later, I was able to do it in only one and a half hours." He continued to refine his programs to make the generation of the online paper as automatic as possible. But the CD had no process in place to continue Csontos’ legacy.

"After elections, they made me a web person. Throughout the whole first year, I was the only one supporting it," added Csontos.

For more than three months after he graduated, while he was working his first professional job, Csontos spent about 40 hours a week rewriting the programs that generated the online edition.

The new version rolled out in the Spring of 1996, and, at the same time, a web staff was elected to give Csontos a much deserved rest.

The online edition, at www.cavalierdaily.com, has been a leader among college newspapers, with new features being added on a regular basis.