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This article is about the technology company. For the explosive-protection regulation, see ATEX directive.

Atex is a technology firm that helped pioneer the switch of newspaper and magazine publishing from "hot lead" to "cold type", and in the process developed networked machines with communication capability ("Atex messaging") credited as a major predecessor of e-mail and instant messaging.

Atex was founded in Massachusetts in 1973 by engineer brothers Richard and Charlie Ying. Atex publishing systems were based on highly modified DEC PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce either news sections or classified advertising sections of newspapers. The systems included clustered CPUs, a distributed file system and dumb terminals that displayed memory-mapped video and featured keyboards with up to 140 keys: Distinctively, the cursor keys were on the left-hand side. A custom operating system tied everything together.

An important feature of an Atex system was data redundancy: every news article or classified advertisement submitted to the system existed on two different hard-drives on two different backend CPUs, thus minimizing the danger of delaying publication because the newspaper's computer was down.

The founders sold to Kodak in the 1980s. Kodak sold Atex to a private group of investors in the 1990s. In 2002 a merger changed the company's name to Atex Media Command, but in December 2004 the company announced its intention to be known again as Atex.

Atex publishing systems were installed at hundreds of publications around the world, including The New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a host of major metropolitan daily newspapers in the United States and abroad, as well as such magazines as Newsweek, Time magazine and U.S. News and World Report.

Atex also sold systems to law firms, catalog retailers and other businesses that needed very robust word processing systems.

The company was late to embrace the potential of personal computers and struggled to replace its PDP-11 architecture with something more modern, but it remains a major player in the business of creating specialized IT systems for print publications.

Atex alumni include Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus and creator of PageMaker, and John Hild and Dave Erickson, founders of XyQuest and creators of XyWrite.

In late 2006, Atex announced that it had acquired the Media business of Unisys Corporation for an undisclosed sum, citing that as their customers - newspaper businesses - are consolidating for survival, so too must the providers of software for this market.

• Atex official site