Just noticed in the beginning of the video it says and at the end I'm pleased

Can we just have an 8 hour livestream of the professor telling stories?

This gentleman that is in this video needs to voice children movies. Can I purchase him to be my grandpa? Does he voice any books on tapes? I think I smelled roses and saw a unicorn just listening to his voice.

....This guy is like the David Attenborough of computing history! XD

"But why would you want to do that. No one wants to do that." Famous last words in business. Famous beginnings for successful new starts.

I used to repair the 202. Floppy disk alignments, CRT alignments and even the occasional software patch using hand-punched paper tape. It had a very heavy PSU - it was no fun carrying that up 3 flights of stairs.

The original memo uses a very scientific statement about the 202 machine: "considerable pain in the posterior"

Looking at old tech just makes you appreciate how far we've come.

Anyone younger than 30 years old just has no clue how difficult it used to be to get specific fonts printed. I'm 43, and I started my computer career in the mid 1980s -- certainly an easier time than the 1970s that Professor Brailsford is speaking about, but still far more difficult than today. True Type fonts simply did not exist. Your printer had to have the fonts built-in -- you had to buy specific (and very expensive) font-cartridges that contained the fonts, and then the software had to recognize those cartridges to be able to utilize the fonts. And the fonts could not be "infinitely" sized -- they had only specific sizes built-in. True Type Fonts are one of the best things ever invented, and all this work that these gentlemen did back in the late '70s is the earliest step taken along that path. Without their work, and the subsequent work of others that followed in their footsteps, printing would still be an EXTREMELY expensive, time-consuming, and difficult process.

$50,000 in 1979 is the equivalent to about $160,550 today

Wow, computer science must be the only field of science where you could be an actual scientist with the up-to-date technologies and then later on become a historian and talk about things no one knows a thing any more... ;-)

This is a great piece of Unix/typesetting history! :) Modern "man" pages (manual pages) on Unix and Unix-like systems are still written in the language that's described here (troff/nroff), and they're easy to typeset/print or display in a terminal window.

Bravo! As a typographile and believer in naturally being able to get the full access to the sourcecode of machines you purchased and *own*, I enjoyed this description of a historic jailbreak very much. About 30 years ago, when this reverse-engineering happened, the dark ages of vendor secrecy and proprietary closed source just began, and we're in an even deeper shit nowadays. This is when I am very thankful for people such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds that played key roles in showing the world that keeping software accessible for you to learn from, improve upon and share is creating a tremendous value for society: GNU/Linux is by far the most common operating system deployed today (most notably in places many people don't realize such as phones, appliances, routers or datacenters of essentially all big internet companies ...)

Best professor on computerphile!

All that font recreation reminds me of when I was at Yellow Pages Group and needed to convert Inuit font families into opentype for the new platform we were releasing. Not only was it a completely unknown language to me but the glyphs were also not roman based nor pictographic. On top of that there were, as with your chess piece trick, zero width glyphs that acted like accents. Luckily I had PDFs to start from that I was able to capture the vector from but going through for the spacing and proper unix character tables took ages to do. Great video!

Are you effin' kidding me? They jailbroke the thing, reverse engineered it, then, as a hobby, at a whim, they REPRODUCED THE ORIGINAL MEMO BY REVERSE ENGINEERING A PHOTOCOPY. That's some inception level hacking there. God I love this guy.

I'd love more videos from Professor Brailsford. I've watched all videos on computerphile, and there are many interesting people in the videos, but Professor Brailsford is without a doubt the best story teller. I love how he makes stories about very specific historic technical challenges come to life. I wonder what he thinks about typing on keyboards, specifically layouts (qwerty, dvorak, etc), and mechanical keyboards vs rubber dome or other types of key switches.

After this video, Dave Brailsford has gone from awesome guru to fucking legend in my mind. I loved this video so hard.

This extreme level of academic geekary is impressive to say the least. Wow, also wow, and wow.

Great video! I'm sure i'm not alone in saying that all videos should be this long!! 10 minutes isn't always long enough to fit all of the info into it - if this video was halved in length it wouldn't have covered anywhere near enough.

04:06 "smelly developer" ... at first I was like... "what ? like a PHP developer ?" But then I realized he was referring to the chemical LOL :)

Wow. I used to work on a Merg 202. It was a cool bit of kit in the day; a big step up from the previous generation of typesetters. My dad headed a team at a commercial printshop that interfaced it to a DG Nova computer to bypass the paper tape input. Fun times.

I love hearing this man tell his stories.

Excellent video! I worked in print for several years in the 90's with some older guys who had been in the business 20 or 30 years at that stage. Man, could those guys talk about fonts and typsetting and composition! Fascinating subject.

As someone who worked at both Mergenthaler's UK affiliate Linotype Paul 1978-79 and also at Bell Labs 1980-1990 this was a fascinating video and I can attest to the lack of quality in the Mergenthaler software of the time. I never worked on the 202 but I did work on its big brother the Linotron 606. There was an interesting problem on the 606 called "character breakup" where seemingly at random and out of the blue small sections of text would intermittently display as if the letters had been chopped up in a blender. It was never repeatable and never the same section of text. Some senior developers had been tasked with finding the problem but had failed to do so and there was speculation it might be a hardware problem or possibly a timing problem. I was working on a customer site commissioning a new installation of 606s and we saw the problem. With the help of the 606 hardware engineer we found the cause was a software bug that only got executed when there was a disk read error transferring the font data from disk into the memory used by the CRT to display the text. So the data was reread from disk but because of the bug the data was placed at an offset address to where it should be so the characters displayed would be part of one character and part of another more or less depending on how many bytes each character used. Solving that was the most interesting thing I did at Linotype. The most interesting thing I did at Bell Labs was attending John Horton Conway's talks, and the second most interesting was hacking the curses library version of the Aliens game to play Pacman on our terminals.

computerphile is awesome

I love watching the videos with Professor Brailsford!

Please never stop making these videos, there great, many thanks

Fascinating bit of history here. I like it. I had no idea typesetting was _that_ much of a hassle back in the day. Seems rather shortsighted of Mergenthaler, though. But then I suppose that reflects a common attitude of companies at the time. One irritating little technical problem: the oblique camera angles on these documents, combined with the low depth of field, makes them pretty hard to look at. I wonder if something can be done about that in the future.

I remember the first time I saw a computer print out a non-built-in character. I was awe struck. I must have been either 19 or 20. The printer was a dot-matrix printer that turned out to have a "graphical" mode where you could print bitmaps. I did play with it a little trying to output PCB etching masks, but soon gave up and went back to hand-drawing them. I greatly admire the perseverance of these people!

In 1981 my mum worked at Hove greyhound track typesetting their programmes on a similar machine -- an Addressograph Multigraph. It was much more primitive than the 202: the CRT was replaced by a spinning disk with characters on it, and a light shone through the disk onto the bromide, exposing one character at a time. Changing fonts meant unscrewing the disk! The results were impressive, though, and I still remember the smell of developer and fixer as the long strip of bromide lay drying on the floor, waiting to go next door to have offset plates made. Laser printers just make it too easy!

This gentleman has the absolute BEST Voice......I'm not even into computer tech.....I just enjoy hearing him speak!

Reading the original complaint letter is totally worth the time... This is one of my favourite parts so far: "Lyle R, our (by now regular) repairman, suggested wiggling the chips [sic] on the code converter board. This apparently nonsensical suggestion in fact cured the problem for a while. Thursday, July 26: The same chip-wiggling exercise became necessary every few hours, from this day forward"

I have a request for a video: "Splines and Bezier Curves"

You could do a PreiodicVideos on developing photos/this kind of prints!

Jesus! I never thought printing fonts would be so complicated...

Fascinating bit of history. Thank you for all the effort to authentically restore the memo!

I loved listening to this guy gush about the typeset printer. The energy in the way he describes the parts and describes how it works really sells me on just how impressive the technology was for its time beyond just his words in text would.

I started printing in the dot matrix generation. I've had a fair share of font problems in my life, and now I understand where it all comes from. Youve filled a gap in my knowledge of printing history. I wish I was there alongside those guys, hacking that 202.

I was a courier for a linotronic bureau in the early eighties, I did find this faciniating.

I love all of your videos. It is great that you interview people that walked their talk!

Wow, this video was very good. I love when you delve into historical aspects of computing.

"web pointers" - such nice way to say link :)

Only 2 minutes into the video, I had a feeling I'm going to get something extraordinarily great. Thanks professor, and everyone else, these videos are indeed a pleasure :D

Adding to a comentary below: I didn't watch many of your videos in Computerphile because they were so short. But I think now, with a length of 15 or more minutes, videos are more enjoyable. I love Computer Science history and I love that Computerphile does these videos long enough to enjoy and dream about old times... Thanks, Computerphile! You're like my "nerd Netflix" now!

Excellent stuff. This guy is so interesting, I could listen to him all day!

I just love this channel. And Professor Brailsford!

Absolutely brilliant storytelling of little known happenings and photography. I dig the bird shadows on the blinds and the subtle lens flares.

Amazing! I love longer more indepth videos like this. Keep it up!

Wow. I cannot believe this. I went to a computer tech school back when such things were almost the BEST way into early computer tech work. Control Data Institute. Thank god. Never would have made it through four years of what passed for computer tech college back in '85. And just now, reading the Vacation Memo, I am astounded to find out that something that the memos authors found a nonsensical, that turned out to slightly ameliorate a problem they were having with the 202, would have been a totally common suggestion coming out of MY mouth, back in those days. "Wiggle the chips" "What? Wiggle the chips?" "YES, dude, you're a PHD electrical engineer. You're dealing with a bunch of little non-heat-sinked IC chips probably pressed into a PCB board, WITHOUT BEING SOLDERED IN!!! Where some of those chips MAY have the character bit maps on them." (OK, I am confabulating a little. Some VRTs stored their character maps as little arrays of timing blips or whatever-the-hells in chips. Address that array on that chip, and that array gets sent to the CRT, the array ends up being a letter "A" when scanned out. Work with me here...) "So where do you THINK an annoying little not-quite-permanent sorta-intermittent problem WOULD live on a PCB full of 16-pin press-fit IC's???" IF it's software, it's yours, debug it. If it's hardware, it's likely to be quite cyclical in nature, and highly reproducible, but if it's FIRMWARE, and that WARE is spread across mulitiple PCB's, (Naked Mini?), then wiggle the damn chips. You probably won't HURT anything, and you might well fix that annoying little not-quite-permanent sorta-intermittent problem. Can't believe I just MIGHT have given a little advice to someone like Brian Kernighan, if I'd been working for Merganthaler at that time. I already knew who HE was. I wasn't nobody! :)

I love the videos with Professor Brailsford! Keep up the good work!

Love it! The longer format is great - more please :)

As always, Prof. Brailsford is amazing! Thank you!

Very nice presentation. I have read the vacation memo with much pleasure. Those were the days that disassembly was still a feasible means to understand how a device worked. And not to forget building a piece of hardware to interface a PDP11 to an external device.

I could listen to Professor Brailsford speak all day.

As an nroff/troff user since 1978, I found this fascinating. At a university department (AGSM at UNSW, Sydney), we didn't have a 202 (and so used nroff rather than troff before 1986), but come the first laser printers, we fell on troff. I still use groff for _all_ my text processing.

Wow, this brings back some memories! I really enjoyed this episode! I so so so remember these fonts, printing like this and in one space I was in practically hallucinating via the chemicals, then cut and paste, then Xerox, etc. (those were the days!)

every video should be this long

Amazing video! Great work on the font professor Brailsford!

Fantastic video! I love bits of history like this.

these video's are what i love youtube for and only these types of video's. memory lane!!

Ha, only a C coder would call a link a pointer, love this channel :D

VERY interesting! Thank you for sharing such a jewel of stories!

+Computerphile I could listen to Professor Brailsford all day. He is my favorite person on all the Brady channels, second is Professor Poliakoff.

I like the typesetting histories.

I won't feel so bad about playing videogames when i hear this genius of a man spent 100+ hours messing around with minor details on a font

Ah the Sicilian defence my favourite opening for black

Great video about a very fascinating story. Thanks for sharing!

As a student learning type design, this piece of history almost makes me cry.

2:30 birds out the window

I could listen to this guy talk for days

Fascinating. Thank you for making this video

new video! how exciting!!

and there I was thinking that I couldn't have any more respect to the UNIX guys... awesome story

Thank you so much for making this!

Great video. Also, both papers made for excellent reading.

That was really cool!

Funny how the 2D graphics of that time had the same restrictions as today's 3D graphics and in fact because we have so awesome 3D hardware compared to 2D these days, even 2D games tend to have circles that are actually visibly comprised of line segments. I wonder when this will finally end and we'll have proper curves in 2D _and_ 3D.

Appreciation of old tech, I am in my element :-)

Great story and teller. Thank you!

You didn't do too bad at all :) Even with todays tools, I'd have trouble recreating some of the new fonts. Very impressive, very cool 80's computertech, awesome vid :)

Funny, I did not know this story. But I did something similar in around 1985/86 as a student project at the Technical University of Delft where we wanted to setup our own fonts on I think a Xerox printer in use at that time. We managed to crack the code (with help of a few other people in the Uk I believe) and created a font to print out the TUDelft logo.

Sorry for the question but I'm too young. What is a typesetter?

This story was so cool, this guy got so many good histories =D

Not gonna lie, I understood maybe 10% of it, but I was watching it in awe, seeing how enthusiastic he is about the past. Must be amazing to be (to have been) his student

And then, Comic Sans happened

Is there any way we can get the recreated Print Out font? Not any real purpose, but because I like to look at it.

Great video!

Great story! Must have been awsome to ne part of the beginning of the computer era.

Amazing video.

Although I really like Tom Scott, Professor Brailsford is the real anchor of this channel. Excellent.

Brilliant - thanks!

Really educational. Thanks

COR! Wunderbar!!!

This is positively nuts!

In 1973 my parents bought their nice house in a nice area for £4000 (Probably about $8000 at the time). Your $50,000 printer would have bought you a mansion in the 1970s.

It is extremely difficult to create a type-face that looks anywhere near acceptable. There are all sorts of optical illusions, which vary according to the point size, as well as the flexibility needed to produce bold and italic versions, numerals, caps and lower-case et al.

This is so awesome! :3

What's a good academic text with more of the history of typography/fonts, Dave, Steve?

I loved this one.