8 ms·
The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video]
- tysone 9y agoThe Times's resident historian, David Dunlap, wrote about this wonderful film in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewell-etaoin-shrdlu/ https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...
- sharpercoder 9y ago"Headlines are still set by hand." I now understand where the word "typesetting" comes from.
- windwake12 9y agoAlot of font terms comes from that time, like leading and kerning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning
- oflannabhra 9y agoInterestingly, the term "font" itself came from the fact that typefaces were cast. "Font" originally described a size, weight, and face. It no longer includes a concept of size, because digital typesetting allows sizes to be changed so easily. What we refer to as a "font" today was originally referred to as a "typeface," that is, the general style of the lettering.
- 0xCMP 9y agoThis explains too how sometimes you see a list of every combination of every "font" in a list and other times you see every font and can configure them. Likely some confusion around this in the documentation and in programmers who implement these features.
- hudibras 9y agoI had a similar thought when they were talking about reading the "galley proofs" and finding errors which were then corrected before the final edition: "Aha! 'Proofreading!'"
- _nato_ 9y agoAs someone who spent the weekend figuring out `flexbox' to align copy around a webpage, after years of floating divs and pulling my hair out, I can appreciate this video. Creative destruction is an awe-inspiring, yet wistful force of nature.
- oflannabhra 9y agoI restored a small scale letterpress several years ago. That gave way to learning about hot metal typesetting, manual typesetting, and other essentially abandoned technologies and skills. I also got to volunteer at a local university library [0] that has a fully functional print shop to learn the necessary skills to manually typeset. Needing several parts, I got to visit a collector who had amassed a warehouse of type, typesetting materials, presses, and parts. Here are some photos [1] [2] [3] Linotype, and this video, represent the pinnacle of mechanical automation for printing. It took over 500 years to go from Gutenberg to the recording of this video, but only a couple of years to go from the invention of the microchip to digital typesetting. What a great reminder of the transforming power of computers! [0] - http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/KLP/tour/ http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/KLP/tour/ [1] - https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZCKGiPrAy_zXgJslBGhi6rRHkpSu1de4xcU0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZCKGiPrAy_zXgJslBGhi6rRHkpSu1d... [2] - https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZnFWCPrUTwdRHmwz6hrf_hQzmuWnD5TnFYs0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZnFWCPrUTwdRHmwz6hrf_hQzmuWnD5... [3] - https://www.instagram.com/p/KSaKYciPrhndq1LVqk1S-iQBvX60FNPDZKx1M0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/KSaKYciPrhndq1LVqk1S-iQBvX60FNPD...
- smolsky 9y agoRight, it looks like the tech progress has been exponential.
- raldi 9y agoYour Instagram links aren't working.
- oflannabhra 9y agoSorry, here they are on Imgur - https://imgur.com/a/Gh7PYp0 https://imgur.com/a/Gh7PYp0
- gregsadetsky 9y agoThank you, great video! This 30 minute movie from 1960 explaining mechanical typesetting is absolutely fascinating if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus
- lolc 9y agoMy favourite is how they could set spaces that were springs that would adjust to the width of the column.
- RichardCA 9y agoI was fortunate enough to have a school field trip to the NY Times in the 70's. If you were a nerdy kid the word "shrdlu" showed up a few times, mostly in PBS documentaries about AI, as it was at the time. If you grew up in the tri-state area, everything important was on Channel 13. Except for Star Trek which had moved into syndication by that time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJz4YKUwqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJz4YKUwqw
- robotresearcher 9y agoSHRDLU was a natural language interface program by Terry Winograd at MIT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
- Analemma_ 9y agoThis is extremely cool, although it's a little unnerving to see people working with so much lead with bare hands, especially considering a lot of them had the job for decades. Was lead poisoning an occupational hazard among typesetters?
- ttul 9y agoThis was my first thought. Although, they were also exposed to enormously high levels of lead just walking around outside because of leaded gasoline.
- opencl 9y agoSolid lead is not really a problem if you wash your hands before eating after handling it because it doesn't absorb through the skin. Whether or not these people actually did that, I have no idea. But to this day there's still plenty of solid lead stuff that hasn't been banned: fishing weights, bullets, etc. The main causes of lead poisoning back in the day were all from inhalation: soldering results in inhaling lead fumes, machining/sanding lead resulted in inhaling lead dust, exhaust from cars using leaded gas (this was the big one that affected basically everyone), etc.
- smacktoward 9y agoLead bullets are actually slowly starting to get banned. California is phasing in a ban on their use in hunting, for instance (see https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Hunting/Nonlead-Ammunition https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Hunting/Nonlead-Ammunition), and the Obama Administration's Interior Department issued a ban on their use in federal wildlife refuges. That latter one was later repealed by the Trump Administration (see http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/322058-interior-secretary-repeals-ban-on-lead-ammunition http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/322058-interior...), but given the hazards lead poses to the environment that's unlikely to be the last word we ever hear on the subject. Beyond hunting, the military is moving in the same direction; the Army has switched to using lead-free bullets as its standard rifle ammunition (https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2014/5/21/testing-the-army-s-m855a1-standard-ball-cartridge/ https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2014/5/21/testing-...), for example.
- tempodox 9y agoThis is a great docu, too bad there is no download button in vimeo.
- xmmrm 9y agohttps://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- rmason 9y agoGuess because I've reached a certain age I remember things like rotary dial phones, vacuum tubes and linotype machines. Until quite recently here in Michigan we still had one weekly paper with handset type. The last linotype operator retired from the New York Times after fifty years in 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-last-hot-type-printer-puts-down-his-tools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- GeekyBear 9y agoThere is an interesting period video that explained the mechanical inter-workings of a Linotype machine available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHOPmGUtPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHOPmGUtPA
- Animats 9y agoA more detailed one is [1]. The amazing thing about Linotypes is how little they changed through their century long life. One would have expected a few generations of the hardware - machines becoming more compact and simpler. But no. There were various models, but the basic form didn't change. [1] https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_45_00 https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_...
- dredmorbius 9y agoA great many systems and designs reach stability relatively early on. Particularly for mechanical systems. Computers are something of an exceeption so far as scale goes, what with Moore's law, though other principles are vastly more durable. (x86 architecture, Unix, core memory, von Neumann / Turing machines, Boolean logic.) In mechanical systems, it's often some particular breakthrough somewhere which makes for changes. In the case of printing, the period from about 1780 -1920 was profound: from wooden "wine press" designs of perhaps 60-120 impressions/hr to electrically-powered, steel-framed, web-fed, linotype-set, offset-press based systems running 1,000,000 impressions/hr.
- tome 9y agoWow, I saw one of these at the Bristol Industrial Museum. A very impressive piece of kit.
- EdSharkey 9y agoAre there any PDF's available of this last manual typeset edition of the NYT for viewing online?
- elemenopy 9y agoApparently[1] it was the July 1, 1978 edition: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/01/issue.html https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/01/iss... (NYT subscription reqd) 1. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewell-etaoin-shrdlu/ https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...
- syncsynchalt 9y agoIt's actually July 2nd 1978, which was produced the night of July 1st. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/02/issue.html https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/02/iss...
- kw71 9y agoAfter about the 11 minute mark the footage shows them working on the front page of the July 1 issue. Looks like they didn't shoot it all in one evening.
- dwighttk 9y agoLook at the computers that replaced them and then imagine how often those have been replaced since then. Of course they did get less expensive pretty quickly (and I'm sure that even though the guy who invented the linotype could sit down at that machine and use it, that doesn't mean those are the same machines from when the NYT started using linotype, which was my initial silly assumption)
- oflannabhra 9y agoAnyone interested in Linotype would greatly enjoy Linotype: The Film [0], a full length documentary that interviews several of the people that made this film. [0] - https://vimeo.com/15032988 https://vimeo.com/15032988
- jiveturkey 9y agoLink is to a trailer, not the actual film. The actual film is at https://shop.linotypefilm.com/ https://shop.linotypefilm.com/ and is $20 for blu-ray or $8 on itunes or $8 on amazon video. I loved the movie Helvetica, I'm sure I'll love Linotype!
- raldi 9y agoWhat always amazes me about this video is how on-board the workforce was with the change -- it was an era of stronger unions, which ensured they'd all keep their jobs for life and be trained to use the new tools, so of course they embraced the new way of doing things. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/07/29/79709965.html?pageNumber=1 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/07/29/797...
- timr 9y agoThis (interesting) article was posted downthread, and makes it clear that the change wasn't accepted by the union. The good times never were: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-last-hot-type-printer-puts-down-his-tools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las... "Staggered by their losses during a 114-day strike led by New York Typographical Union No. 6, from late 1962 to early 1963, the city’s publishers resolved to begin automating their composing rooms as quickly as possible. Just as quickly, the union shops, or “chapels,” began pushing back." "But it would not be until July 1974 that Big Six and The Times and Daily News reached a landmark agreement. Their new contract freed the publishers to introduce automation, while effectively guaranteeing lifetime job security to 1,785 situation-holders and full-time substitutes, 810 of whom were at The Times"
- raldi 9y agoHuh? That quote says the union negotiated a deal that did exactly what I said it did. The subject of the piece continued to work at the Times for another 38 years, until his voluntary retirement.
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoDuring their work with Linotype they got into close contact with lead, this often leads to lead poisoning. I guess they would have retired relatively early. For all the nostalgia people tend to forget that this stuff was a health hazard. https://rarecachebroadcast.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/linotype-and-lead-poisoning/ https://rarecachebroadcast.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/linotype...
- Jun8 9y agoAt 14:40: "All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years is all locked in a little box called the computer. And, I think, probably most jobs will end up the same way."
- rimliu 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOM5_V5jLAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOM5_V5jLAs (this talk also mentions linotype).
- InclinedPlane 9y agoOn the one hand, it's fascinating to see how (overly) complicated the process of printing used to be. On the other hand, it looks much simpler now because we gloss over all the complexity in the silicon. Back then there were thousands of components, today there are billions and they all operate at millions or billions of actions per second. But it all happens inside tiny little packages about the size of a sugar cube.
- jrockway 9y agoI'm somewhat fascinated by the technical aspects of the videography here. Solid chunks of color "shimmer" as though random noise was added by a digital sensor. Then there are lines, presumably on the original film, that appear light green instead of white. I can't think of anything to account for either of these effects.
- dylan604 9y agoFilm scratches are not all equal. Some scratches would go all the way through the emulsion resulting in solid white or black lines depending on if it was a print or a negative. However, if the scratch as not that deep, then the scratch would have a color tint depending on its depth. Maybe this is what you are seeing? If you provide a time reference to a specific example, I can take a look to see if that matches what I'm describing. I used to work in film post in transferring and restoration. The restoration software is pretty magical. The scanning software/hardware has also come a long way, but the really nice equipment is still $150k-$250k(US) depending on the options.
- jrockway 9y ago2:37 is one. There are others that are green in dark areas and pink in light areas, however. That's what's so weird about it. I will think more but scratching the emulsion only partially sounds like a really good explanation to me. Where the image is dark, though, there should be very little dye left in the emulsion, so I'm not 100% convinced. Still thinking about it though :)
- azinman2 9y agoCurious to know how the photos got turned into casts. Does anyone know?
- grzm 9y agoPhotoengraving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoengraving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoengraving
- dylan604 9y agoI wonder how many Quark users would dream of going back to the manual ways? Quark is still my number one of "least favorite to use programs". I could just never think the way Quark wanted me to thing. I took to PageMaker in a heartbeat, but just never got Quark.
- ahemphill 9y agoQuark 4 was definitely full of quirks and there were plenty of things it just couldn't do. It featured decent keyboard shortcuts, though, which I once relied on daily for newspaper layout — and which proved quite difficult to teach to my successor as, ultimately, I knew them only by feel!
- supernova87a 9y agoSigh, almost makes you wish for the days when it really cost something to publish words, and not every moron with a wifi connection could tweet to the world one more banal opinion adding to the noise saturating everyone's attention spans.
- fzzzy 9y agoThis is a very interesting observation. The decrease in the difficulty of publishing vastly increased the noise. I think I understood that this was happening but hadn’t consciously made the connection.