There are a few things wrong with Cringely's story: - According to this story, TAOCP Volume 1 was typeset using hot-metal printing, Volume 2 was typeset using

There are a few things wrong with Cringely's story: - According to this story, TAOCP Volume 1 was typeset using hot-metal printing, Volume 2 was typeset using "photo-offset printing to save money for the publisher" (which Knuth didn't like), and Volume 3 was typeset using TeX. But in reality, the first editions of all three volumes of TAOCP (Vol 1 1968, Vol 2 1969, Vol 3 1973), and the second edition of Volume 1 (1973), were all typeset using hot-metal printing. It was the galley proofs of the second edition of Volume 2 (in preparation around 1977) which used photo-typesetting, but this was never published. Ultimately the second edition of Volume 2 when published in 1981 used digital typesetting (TeX + Metafont). - He claims that in "volume 3" (let's charitably assume he meant the 1981 second edition of Volume 2, as this is the only thing that makes sense: the next editions of these volumes were from 1997–98, after "Accidental Empires" was published), he "saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer" and "Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful" — but this makes no sense, as these published books were (obviously!) not printed using a low-resolution laser printer, but were printed using a good digital typesetter at 5000+ dpi. For more history, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/367058/wheres-an-example-of-the-bad-typesetting-that-inspired-tex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/367058/wheres-an-exa... So either the story is completely made up, or (accounting for lapses in memory etc), Cringely may have meant one of the following: 1. The fonts used in 1981 (Vol 2 2nd edition) were not the final version and were further refined (see Knuth's "burned with disappointment" linked above), leading to the current Computer Modern (BTW: try not to use the thin/spindly on-screen versions: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722) after further consultation with leading type designers, 2. Cringely may have been talking about something like the 1979 book "TeX and METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting", which is basically a very early application of the prototype TeX78 that was still being developed at the time, and was indeed (I think) typeset on the Xerox Graphic Printer (XGP), and you can indeed easily see the low-resolution artefacts. (They're impossible to miss: if such a conversation as above indeed happened, and about this book or something from that early period, likely what Knuth said was something like "yes of course the type looks bad in this book, but it's been designed for a real (higher-resolution) digital typesetter and it will look fine there", not that he couldn't see it.)