[HN Gopher] Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video]
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Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video]
Author : well_actulily
Score : 194 points
Date : 2022-05-09 09:10 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| scoot wrote:
| What an incredible industrial process. So many people involved,
| and that was just the type-setting and printing. Incredible
| pressure too where if the product doesn't make it to market in
| time, the key morning sales window is missed, and the product
| becomes obsolete.
|
| I wonder what happened to all this machinery in the end? It was
| mentioned that it would be auctioned, but I can't imagine the
| buyer continued to operate this process for much longer. It would
| be nice to think that they're still operational in a museum
| somewhere, albeit without the scale and pressure of deadlines.
| mold_aid wrote:
| The Columbus Dispatch's lino was in their building, still, as
| of last year, looking for a museum home. A bunch are in museums
| - the problem with this machinery and stuff like Heidelbergs
| and C&Ps is that they were all made around the turn of the
| century in cast iron and weigh a ton. In the 2000s there was a
| huge craze to refurbish the old machines and a lot are in cozy
| print shops, their sizes really useful for greeting cards and
| wedding invitations. But they're hard to move, maintain,
| provide adequate ventilation for, get parts for...
| acadapter wrote:
| >I wonder what happened to all this machinery in the end?
|
| Perhaps it was exported to countries that couldn't afford the
| latest technology?
|
| There is for example a coal mine in Bosnia that is known among
| train enthusiasts, because it uses steam locomotives from WWII.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > a coal mine in Bosnia that is known among train enthusiasts
|
| https://www.farrail.com/pages/touren-engl/bosnia-
| kriegslok-s...
|
| > Perhaps it was exported to countries that couldn't afford
| the latest technology?
|
| In 1978 that could been happened. By the '90s nobody would
| bother, though.
| scoot wrote:
| Not as compelling as the 1978 video, but I came across this piece
| on the current process:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/insider/times-printing-pl...
| imglorp wrote:
| Interesting that the moveable type era lasted 900 years; the
| linotype era 100 years, and the paper cut-and-paste era maybe
| only 20.
| pp19dd wrote:
| For what it's worth, that trend is accelerating in its digital
| stage. Newspaper CMSs change so frequently, they approach
| abandonware territory within years and artifacts are left
| behind.
|
| If you attend any large news site and search for "test" you
| will find those scraps as evidence of prior CMSs. Like chicago
| tribune "joe assembler test 1" or latimes "now testing
| assembler and p2p" or cnn "this is a developer test"
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| Excellent documentary.
|
| All that talk of hot lead made me wonder how many workers in
| there suffered some form of lead poisoning:
|
| https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4426
| ttul wrote:
| The olden days were dirty! Never mind that cars were burning
| leaded gas too. I wonder if the print shop air was actually
| cleaner than the air in Manhattan back then?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| And paint had lead, too.
| mold_aid wrote:
| The machines also had asbestos in them, which was pretty bad.
| scoot wrote:
| 14:10 _" It's inevitable that we're going to go into computers.
| All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years is all locked
| up in a little box now, called a computer. And I think probably
| most jobs are going to end up the same way."_
| gugagore wrote:
| And from that, to what stands out is that the knowledge is
| "locked up". I'd say that resonates with the experience people
| generally have with computers. New technology tends to be less
| legible.
| jll29 wrote:
| Yes, that sentence stood out, from an emotional and automation
| point of view.
|
| I'm grateful to the producers of this film for conserving the
| historic knowledge. Makes me wonder how many areas have gone
| that were similarly fascinating where no such video was made.
| anon946 wrote:
| At 25:15: "More than 8 million words can be stored and sent back
| by each disk pack".
|
| Each disk looks the size of a vinyl record, and there are a whole
| stack of them in a disk pack.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Well if we say a word is ~4 letters and a space, plus a bit of
| overhead for the file system, that's a 64 mb a pack, so
| probably something like a 4 or 8 mb disk, which feels about
| right for the time
| lupire wrote:
| MB. B is 8b
| wejick wrote:
| TIL. The much older predecessor of qwertyuiop.
| trasz wrote:
| I knew where "etaoin shrdlu" came from, but I never realized it
| was vertical, not horizontal.
| well_actulily wrote:
| It's kinda wild how alien the Linotype layout looks compared
| to a standard QWERTY keyboard, despite them being relatively
| contemporary with one another.
| dickiedyce wrote:
| My first programs were in Basic on punch tape sent down an
| acoustic coupler to Imperial College in 1981. I get that it was
| the end of an era. But just after leaving school, I ran a
| Linotype photo-setter in the late 1980's - with different
| spinning optical discs for different fonts, and Hot wax rollers,
| and Letraset lines. And after university, I worked on computer
| magazines in W1, which went from photo-setting to Desktop
| Publish. So I remember an entire era, from start to finish. Boy,
| do I feel old.
| cafard wrote:
| By the early 1980s, Mergenthaler was selling the 202, which
| used computerized fonts rather than spinning film, and was
| considerably faster. A type-shop owner I met in New Jersey said
| that in the spinning film (VIP) days, his company ran the VIP
| three shifts, graveyard being given over to someone whose third
| job it was, and who slept beside the machine, which had been
| rigged to sound an alarm at end of job. Once the 202 came in,
| the backlog went away.
| mproud wrote:
| I think I saw this shared a year or two ago here.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Etaoin Shrdlu_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071164
| - Nov 2021 (33 comments)
|
| _Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538028 - June 2020 (46
| comments)
|
| _English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN
| SRHLDCU (2013)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20541263 -
| July 2019 (10 comments)
|
| _1978 - 'Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16907778 - April 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDLU (1978)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806072 - Nov 2017 (1
| comment)
|
| _Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDL: The Last Day of Hot Metal Typesetting
| at the NY Times_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070183
| - Nov 2016 (1 comment)
|
| _Etaoin shrdlu_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958143 -
| July 2015 (1 comment)
| dag11 wrote:
| I can't help but re-watch this entire video in full every time I
| come across it. What an amazing documentation.
|
| I wonder what next transition looked like to them. I imagine the
| most significant change was moving from paste ups to digital
| layouts in the 90s.
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm no expert-- but from what I understand, the only really
| risky part is in the remelter where lead oxides form. When just
| handling lead type-- an alloy of tin, elemental lead, and
| antimony-- unless you actually ingest it (where it can mimic
| calcium in deleterious way in larger amounts) then it's not
| very dangerous, so handwashing before eating, etc. is good
| enough.
| Retric wrote:
| What I remember most about this is they never mention the
| health issues of people constantly working with lead. It's an
| interesting documentary, but really beings out that the past is
| a different country feeling.
| lupire wrote:
| 1917 book calling out lead exposure and also the lack of
| physical movement and outdoors/freshwater on the job:
| https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4426
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I kept expecting them to mention the safety benefits of not
| using lead, but it never came up. Guess they didn't care.
| Explains why nobody was wearing eye protection, or ear
| protection. Probably not a lot of steel-toed boots, either.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Not to mention the fact that they often hired already deaf
| operators because the volume were so deafening.
| Maraguy wrote:
| So this was the primary reason they hired deaf people?
| xattt wrote:
| For anyone else that likes the optimism of historical printing
| films, this is highly recommended: https://printingfilms.com/
| haunter wrote:
| The version on Vimeo is much higher quality, it's a scan from the
| original 16mm film. Cleaner + colors are better too, the
| Archive.org upload has a yellow/green tint.
|
| Vimeo: https://files.catbox.moe/2jzh3z.png
|
| Archive.org: https://files.catbox.moe/470r44.png
|
| https://vimeo.com/127605643 (you can download the raw source
| upload with yt-dlp)
| well_actulily wrote:
| The version on Vimeo has vertical scratches running through
| most frames, which I find a bit distracting. So I prefer the
| Archive.org version despite it being less sharp and with the
| hue shift, but "diff'rent strokes" and all.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Alright, who's gonna make the "I have two sources of the same
| footage with different flaws and I want to combine the best of
| both" AI?
| unpopularopp wrote:
| Any what was this OS and text editor they used back then?
| https://i.imgur.com/UygEIkJ.png
|
| Edit: well it's just a terminal not a full PC but seems to be
| model 1746? That's the closest shot
| https://i.imgur.com/mGlb2va.png
| skywal_l wrote:
| I wonder too. There seems to be some element of WYSIWYG as the
| font can take different sizes. For 1979, it is pretty advanced.
| Xerox Bravo was doing this a few years earlier but Xerox was
| well in advance of its time.
| KineticArms wrote:
| It appears to be caps and no caps to me.
| skywal_l wrote:
| In the video, 22:15.
| KineticArms wrote:
| Thanks
| thesuitonym wrote:
| No idea on the OS, but I'd venture a guess that the text editor
| was some bespoke application made specifically for the
| industry, and if you weren't in it, you've never heard of it.
| leoc wrote:
| Good question!
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...
| mentions an IBM 1620 being installed, but that was all the way
| back in 1964. The 1978 coverage of switchover day
| http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/03/1108...
| mentions that the Times had spent $17 million each year over
| the past three years, and that the actual typsetting machine
| was a Letterflex. But no details of the computer software or
| hardware, AFAICS.
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| They showed a Data General nameplate at one point. The panels
| with blinky light bulbs and a button for "IPL" suggest IBM.
| Some of the PC boards they showed had 7400 series TTL, and
| others raw transistors in metal cans. Those might have been
| just stock footage.
|
| There was another panel with somebody flipping what looked
| more like Digital Equipment Corp. switches. Normally, you
| would do that only when booting the machine: you would put in
| a program by setting switches for a few words in memory --
| set, store, set, store,... -- and run that to read in and run
| a paper tape that itself had just enough code to read and run
| a boot sector from disk, and off you went.
|
| The notion of buying expensive, read-only memory useful only
| when you boot was absurd. (You needed the paper tape reader
| anyway.)
|
| Often there was a stick with notches for the switches. You
| would flip all the switches up and push the stick against
| them, pushing some down, and store, then rotate the stick and
| do it again. Cheap ROM. The program to read paper tape was
| very short.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Stressing! Feels like release day.
| nils-m-holm wrote:
| My father was the PR manager of a publishing house and the print
| shop of the company was just one block away from where we lived,
| so I was a frequent visitor there. I was fascinated by the
| technology and saw the transition from hot lead typesetting to
| phototypesetting first hand. This documentation will always have
| a special place in my heart.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| How did they transfer photographs to the lead casts?
| quercusa wrote:
| Photographic prints were re-shot through halftone[0] film (or
| 'screen') producing a 'screened' version of the image, with
| dots at various sizes instead of continuous tones. The screened
| image was then used to expose a sensitized plate, which would
| be developed to produce a half-toned negative in metal. The
| high spots took ink and carried it to the paper. More dots,
| more ink -> darker.
|
| Typical newspapers might use a screen with 80 dots per inch
| because they are running very fast and using cruddy paper. Art
| printers on shiny clay paper use much finer screens and get
| results approaching the original prints.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone
| jvandonsel wrote:
| A related film to put on your watchlist: "Linotype: The Film".
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2130114/
| digitalsankhara wrote:
| Thanks for the link to this. Fascinating documentary. Lost art &
| craft of printmaking. When writing LaTeX I often thought about
| how it translates to traditional typesetting using linotypes. The
| terminology in digital typesetting has its roots from that craft.
|
| Side Note: I could have started my working life in newsprint as
| when I were a lad, just out of school in the late 70's and being
| mad keen on radio and electronics, I applied for a job (didn't
| get it) as a teleprinter technician at the local newspaper
| (Doncaster Free Press). These were the electro-mechanical
| teletypes running 24/7 to capture news "on the wires". I thought
| I'd be in with a shot as I had my own Creed 7B clacking away in
| my bedroom - when allowed by my long suffering, but enabling
| parents!
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