This system sounds way too familiar.
The setup here sounded very familiar! Back in the mid-1980s, I repaired Ontel terminals when they became part of Visual Technology. Among their many OEM customers was Olivetti for whom they setup a word-processing system that ran CP/M, although I didn't need that for testing and instead used an Ontel O/S based machine connected to the terminals.
The terminals had what were called at the time word-mover-controllers. These cards did what we do today in memory except it was all shift-registers and static RAM for text buffers used for cutting and pasting text. These cards were a beast to work on too because of all the loops and clock dividers on them.
A few years later, I worked for the family graphics business. My bro ran one of those photostat cameras mentioned in the article, and I ran a Varityper Epics 20/20 typesetting system. I would "set" the type in galleys and the output was then covered on the blank side with wax or rubber cement. These galleys were then pasted down on Strathmore boards and my bro shot the photostats and sometimes films for the local print shops.
What was interesting is the Varityper had built-in filters to handle input from WordStar. In the 1980s, I had a Visual V-1050 that had that among other programs. One day we needed some additional help handling some coupons. Using my V-1050, my sister typed up the text in WordStar and I used the Varityper telecom package to import it from the V-1050. It worked perfectly and this was our backup terminal for a few years.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
