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Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video]
- dag11 4y agoI 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.
- Retric 4y agoWhat 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.
- kristofferR 4y agoNot to mention the fact that they often hired already deaf operators because the volume were so deafening.
- Maraguy 4y agoSo this was the primary reason they hired deaf people?
- lupire 4y ago1917 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 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4426
- thesuitonym 4y agoI 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.
- chefandy 4y agoI'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.
- jamesfmilne 4y agoExcellent 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 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4426
- mold_aid 4y agoThe machines also had asbestos in them, which was pretty bad.
- ttul 4y agoThe 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 4y agoAnd paint had lead, too.
- xattt 4y agoFor anyone else that likes the optimism of historical printing films, this is highly recommended: https://printingfilms.com/ https://printingfilms.com/
- scoot 4y agoWhat 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 4y agoThe 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 4y ago>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 4y ago> a coal mine in Bosnia that is known among train enthusiasts https://www.farrail.com/pages/touren-engl/bosnia-kriegslok-steam-2010.php 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 4y agoNot 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-plants-delivery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/insider/times-printing-pl...
- scoot 4y ago14:10 "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."
- jll29 4y agoYes, 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.
- gugagore 4y agoAnd 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.
- wejick 4y agoTIL. The much older predecessor of qwertyuiop.
- trasz 4y agoI knew where "etaoin shrdlu" came from, but I never realized it was vertical, not horizontal.
- well_actulily 4y agoIt's kinda wild how alien the Linotype layout looks compared to a standard QWERTY keyboard, despite them being relatively contemporary with one another.
- imglorp 4y agoInteresting that the moveable type era lasted 900 years; the linotype era 100 years, and the paper cut-and-paste era maybe only 20.
- _jing 4y agoFor 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"
- haunter 4y agoThe 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 https://files.catbox.moe/2jzh3z.png Archive.org: https://files.catbox.moe/470r44.png https://files.catbox.moe/470r44.png https://vimeo.com/127605643 https://vimeo.com/127605643 (you can download the raw source upload with yt-dlp)
- well_actulily 4y agoThe 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 4y agoAlright, 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?
- jvandonsel 4y agoA related film to put on your watchlist: “Linotype: The Film”. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2130114/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2130114/
- anon946 4y agoAt 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.
- dickiedyce 4y agoMy 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 4y agoBy 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.
- unpopularopp 4y agoAny what was this OS and text editor they used back then? https://i.imgur.com/UygEIkJ.png 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 https://i.imgur.com/mGlb2va.png
- skywal_l 4y agoI 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 4y agoIt appears to be caps and no caps to me.
- skywal_l 4y agoIn the video, 22:15.
- KineticArms 4y agoThanks
- leoc 4y agoGood question! 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... 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/1978/07/03/110883218.html 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.
- marcodiego 4y agoStressing! Feels like release day.
- mproud 4y agoI think I saw this shared a year or two ago here.
- nils-m-holm 4y agoMy 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.
- dang 4y agoRelated. Others? Etaoin Shrdlu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071164 - Nov 2021 (33 comments) Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538028 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20541263 - July 2019 (10 comments) 1978 – 'Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16907778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16907778 - April 2018 (2 comments) Farewell – ETAOIN SHRDLU (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806072 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070183 - Nov 2016 (1 comment) Etaoin shrdlu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958143 - July 2015 (1 comment)
- tinus_hn 4y agoHow did they transfer photographs to the lead casts?
- quercusa 4y agoPhotographic 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone
- digitalsankhara 4y agoThanks 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!