But as it has been throughout its 175-year history The Examiner was at the forefront of change and computers were taking over the “composing” room that had only a few years before been a noisy factory floor full of Linotype machinery, molten metal and grammatically pedantic men.

The world of slugs, sticks, chases and formes, where news was hot before going to press rather than hot off the press, was no more familiar than the great strings of code I was also being taught to produce that same simple sentence on a computer printout.

I was among the first handful of females to work in the composing room and completed an apprenticeship to become a compositor, employed like those before me because I could type.

Not the 90-character Linotype machine keyboard where capitals and lowercase had separate buttons, but the “modern” qwerty keyboard attached to tiny monitors with a few lines of plasma type visible.

In 1975, The Examiner had become one of the first dailies in Australia to introduce computerised photocomposition.

With computerisation, production costs became far cheaper and designing a page became far more flexible, with options for typefaces and font sizes.

We still clocked in and out, smoked at our desks and wore stiff blue aprons as we pieced the newspaper together scrap-book style using hot wax and a Stanley knife.

Eventually sub-editors started to use basic desktop publishing programs to display their stories on the screen and soon whole pages were laid out and printed from computers.

Another trade was dying a slow death and the young and ambitious compositors retrained as sub-editors, transferring their editing skills from hand make-up to desk-top publishing, and some like myself even turned their hand to writing.

For several decades now computer technicians have been kept busy ensuring The Examiner is still at the forefront of a continuous, fast-paced string of new desktop-publishing methods, software programs and other printing innovations.

The 24-hour news cycle was born, where journalists have the ability to interview, photograph and write their stories and get them onto a page the same day, not days or a week later. Now the news that The Examiner delivers is only minutes old, sometimes in real time online, and 80 per cent of readers are accessing stories digitally on their devices.

1842: The Examiner launches and is produced on a hand press which could produce from 200 to 250 sheets an hour.

1853: The Examiner becomes tri-weekly and its format changes to double-demy broadsheet of pages. Hand press replaced with one bought from the Melbourne Argus – ‘‘but it was still slow and clumsy, worked by two men who turned a large flywheel’’.

1855: May 26 was described as a ‘‘red-letter day’’ for he Examiner as it is printed for the first time on a new machine driven by steam. 1860: Printing time for The Examiner changes from 2pm to 6am daily.

1877: December 21 was the day The Examiner became a morning daily.

1881: The Examiner changes its size to double royal size and the Launceston Advertiser and The Cornwall had been absorbed. ‘‘A regiment of boys are waiting ready to dart off as soon as they have received their complement of newspapers while cars convey huge bundles for delivery by post and train’’.

1892: Production jobs grow from 12 to upwards of 100. The Examiner has established the most complete printing set-up in the southern hemisphere, embracing all branches of letterpress, lithographic, photozinco and fine chromelithographic work, stereotyping, bookbinding, wholesale and retail stationery and printers’ furnishing.

1896: First Linotype machines arrive allowing a big advance from the original hand-picking of individual type characters. The Examiner building is first to be lit by electricity.

1924: The Saturday Evening Express was established as a mainly sporting results newspaper.

1927: A Battle Creek Tubular Duplex press is installed capable of printing up to 30,000 newspapers an hour. Each printing unit could print four or eight tabloid pages.

1955: Late and tight deadlines for The Saturday Evening Express to include last race results and final football scores as well as meet delivery demand on the North-West Coast, were the impetus for the company to install an Octuple Hoe press, again from the Melbourne Argus. This press could produce up to 60,000 an hour and it was a system that worked well until growth of advertising forced the paper above 32 pages and a reversion to straight production.

1958: A Klimsche Autovertical camera was installed and allowed photography onto sheets of film.

1964: Rebuilding and extensions transform the composing room, but it continues to house a battery of 12 Linotype machines.

1968: The Crabtree Viscount press is installed into a new building at the rear of the Paterson Street office. This press can produce at up to 50,000 copies an hour with paging up to 64 tabloid. It also has limited spot colour capability.

1970: Phototypesetting begins with a Filmotype machine introduced to improve the appearance of heading in feature pages by using typefaces different to the remainder of the newspaper. A Morisawa machines was also installed which was fitted with a lens turret to allow the output to be in the final size required. Photon P16 is bought and output from the keyboard is a punched paper tape, which is fed into the photon machine. This produces type on a resin-coated photographic paper, which was then wax-coated and ‘pasted-up’ onto a grid sheet by compositors. This system was used for display advertisements daily as a pilot exercise to assist the phasing in of this new form of composing. The finished result continues to be an engraving onto zinc sheet.

1975: The Examiner is among the first dailies in Australia to introduce computerised photocomposition. Cost pressures forced a change away from the Linotype hot metal based typesetting systems as it was too labour intensive. On August 19 the first keyboard operators ceased to use Linotypes and instead operated keyboards, which produced punched paper tape. By October all operation of Linotypes on piecework was concluded.

1978: A new system is tried to capture news keystrokes from outside sources. Mainland and overseas news had arrived on teleprinters and all had to be rekeyboarded for use in the he newspaper. TLok paper tape punches were supplied by Telecom and op[operated in parallel with the teleprinter. The saved text was then edited on a Digital VT20b terminal and saved much keyboarding.

1980: A larger computer system A Digital PDP 11/70 is installed and following an industrial dispute at Fairfax in Sydney, journalists and telephone advertising staff are permitted to input typeset material directly. The 11/70s remain in operation until July 1990.

1982: Two Compugraphic 8600 CRT phototypesetters are installed. The operating concept is that the image to be phototypeset appears on a fibreoptic faceplate of the CRT and the photographic paper moves across the faceplate. Speed was substantially increased as was the range of point sizes and typefaces available.

1984: The Saturday Evening Express changes its name to The Sunday Examiner and becomes a Sunday morning newspaper.

1986: Goss Community 4 hi press is installed at Galvin Street premises allowing preprinting of eight-page sections in full colour by the web offset process. On May 4, an eight-page Colour Sunday section is preprinted and inserted into The Sunday Examiner. The first Autokon monochrome scanners is installed. This is a daylight operation and greatly improves the preparation of illustrations for pasteup. A second machine is added in 1989 to handle increased volume.

1987: A dish is installed on the roof of Paterson Street as part of a satellite service delivering news directly from AAP.

1988: Major first-floor renovations are undertaken at Paterson Street offices. 1989: Cybergraphics is selected as favoured integrated production solution where original keystrokes relating to billing etcetera could be captured.

1990: The Examiner prints its first regional publication, Tamar Times. Suncoast News follows in 1993.

1997: All newspaper printing is transferred to new headquarters at Rocherlea. Space vacated at Paterson Street is refurbished to expand office accommodation and use rear basement space for car parking.