Rene Smith Jalbert — most Courant folks remember her as Rene Smith — reports that she and her husband Alex Jalbert, also a Courant ex,  are ” happily unemployed now. ”

Rene, who was an expert at Atex chart codes, among other things, says “I’ve just retired early again from Valpak (a Cox Company!) and Alex is recovering well from throat cancer and a laryngectomy. I’m unemployed because I took an early retirement again to keep our health insurance, and am enjoying a little break. I’ve taken a CNA [nurses assistant] course and will be wiping butts sometime soon.”

Atex, for those of you who don’t know, was the Courant’s main word-processing computer system that took up an entire air-conditioned room on the second floor. It was a “dead head” system, meaning all the important computing took place downstairs while we mere mortals worked at dumb terminals elsewhere in the building. It was sort of like Pong is to today’s computer games. Eight Atex mainframes spoke to a bunch of phototypesetters that spit out streams of cold type, that was cut and pasted onto flats. All those composers who did the pasting are now gone, of course. I’m sure they are not the last people in the newspaper game whose skill set became obsolete.