Coldwell died earlier this month in Le Touquet, France, where he lived with his wife Pat, and his funeral, a family only service, has already taken place.

He co-founded Diss, Norfolk-based Xenotron in 1976 with Iain Houghton. It developed computerised newspaper publishing systems based on minicomputers.

“The Xenotron XVC series in particular pioneered page layout, which was a whole lot harder than creating columns of text, which is what other systems mostly did at the time,” industry expert and writer Simon Eccles explained.

Coldwell left Xenotron in 1986 when it was taken over by Hell and became Hell-Xenotron. Hell later merged with Linotype in 1990, and Linotype-Hell was then acquired by Heidelberg in 1997.

After the initial Hell acquisition Coldwell moved on to Tecsa, which made scanners for newspapers. He was chairman and CEO of the business for nearly 20 years, to 2007. Most recently he was web editor for Global Print Monitor.

Several of Coldwell’s former Xenotron colleagues paid tribute when contacted by Printweek, including Houghton who joined Linotype-Paul in Kingsbury around 1971, and took over Coldwell’s old office at that business.

Coldwell had just left to form Coltec with Steve Larkin and Vic Lovett. He had spent some time working in sales at Linotype and at Coltec the trio designed a counting keyboard which they licenced back to Linotype and sold several classified systems to UK Newspapers.

At Linotype, Houghton wrote the software for one of its US-built phototypesetters and returned to the UK to set up operations in Sweden and Brussels. In 1973 he left Linotype to form phototypesetting software firm GPH. Coldwell left Coltec in around 1976 while Houghton left GPH, and they together formed Xenotron.

“Tim had the finances and marketing/sales knowledge and I had the software knowledge and had specified a variable type-size bit mapped terminal at GPH,” said Houghton.

“Tim was a true entrepreneur and lived and breathed Xenotron, driving the company forward. In 1976/1977 we showed the Xenotron Video Composer (for composing display adverts on-screen) at Newstec, Drupa, and ANPA. We had excellent reviews from the Seybold Report.

He said Xenotron grew from two people to around 200, with offices in the UK, Boston, US, and Melbourne, Australia, and by this time had full database systems with Admaster, Xenotron Graphics Terminal (Artmaster), and Page makeup terminals (Pagemaster).

“Xenotron had products all over Europe, the Far East, Australia, and the US, often accompanied with Monotype Lasercomps. We also sold product for Yellow Page Systems and Business Forms,” Houghton said.

Xenotron’s eventual demise led to many new companies being formed. Its alumni started and ran a raft of industry firms including Hyphen, Cascade Systems, Centurfax, Highwater Designs, Baric, Hydra Designs, Cybervision, Midsystem Technology, Serif, Engage, Mediabridge Technologies, Wave 2 Media Solutions, Iceni Technology, and Papermule, among others.

“In the 1970s, newspaper products were driving tech, just as smartphones are now,” Houghton said.

He noted the arrival of cheap bitmapped products such as the PC and Apple Mac in the early 1980s was problematic for companies like Xenotron with software locked into specific hardware.

Richard Patterson was R&D manager at Xenotron for nine years. He left in 1987 to set up Hyphen, one of the first non-Adobe PostScript RIP makers, and then in 1993 founded Cascade Systems, which made workflow systems for newspapers in the 1990s.

“I was lucky enough to be employed at Xenotron in September 1978 and the next nine years that I was there were a varied education,” said Patterson.

“Tim was a true visionary and a very inspiring leader. He assembled a company which employed an incredible array of highly talented people. This is best illustrated by the numerous companies that came out of Xenotron both directly and indirectly.

“It is true to say that Xenotron and the associated companies changed the face of the printing and publishing industry.”

He said Xenotron was the first company to produce full WYSIWYG newspaper pages – including graphics – in 1980 and output them to a laser imagesetter.

Graham Manders joined Xenotron in 1978 as one of its first programmers and worked on the initial code for Coldwell’s XVC1 Video Composer. Manders also came over to the business from Linotype-Paul.

Over the next 10 years at Xenotron, Manders said he worked with a young, talented group of engineers developing the early WYSIWYG terminals.

“Tim was a significant and influential person in my life and career, as he was to many of my contemporaries,” Manders said.

“He was an inspirational, charismatic, and visionary leader with the rare ability to identify emerging technology and utilise it to develop new products for the print sector worldwide, during a period of drastic change in the industry, as it moved from hot metal to digital solutions.

“Tim was a kind and generous man and the door to his house was always open. We were always welcomed in to eat, drink, discuss business or any other problems or just to kick back and socialise.

“He was a catalyst for me and many others to take his unique approach to business forward and the many individuals and companies that subsequently evolved from Tim’s business and leadership are a testament to the man.”

Bob Leslie, who joined Xenotron in 1982 as an engineer and worked at the firm for around five years, including as a project manager, described Coldwell as “an inspiration”.

“He showed other people that their dreams could be met, and the amount of companies that were spawned from Xenotron is absolutely incredible. Lots of people went on to create new projects, but they all came together out of that core place that was Xenotron.

“I have always likened Xenotron in those days to what people imagined Apple to be – nobody ever considered that they were the boss, everybody was just pulling together in the same direction. And that was Tim – he gave the business that feeling; you could walk in and talk to him at any time, and he always had time for everybody and was part of the team.”

Leslie and Martyn Elmy, who died in 2021, went on to form Centurfax.