
Experience with the Mergenthaler Linotron 202 Phototypesetter (1980) [pdf] - thristian
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pdf
======
pmoriarty

      "Since we began using this program instead of Mergenthaler’s
      formatter, most of our “hardware” problems have disappeared.
    
      ...
    
      There is also a memory diagnostic sufficiently better than
      Mergenthaler’s that the repairman asked for a private copy (which we
      provided, on paper tape)."
    

Reading this part made me think, "of course! It was written by some of the
most brilliant minds at Bell Labs." Many compaines would be lucky to have had
software for them written by Bell Labs.

Considering what a piece of junk the 202 and the software running it turned
out to be, Mergenthaler would have done better to just give the 202 to Bell
Labs for free and opened up all their hardware and software specs to them, on
the condition that the Bell Labs team rewrote their software, and made
suggestions for improving the hardware, or even paid Bell Labs for the
privilege. That would have been a win-win for both companies.

~~~
thawkins
Linotype/Mergenthaler shipped 1000's of 202s, they where considered to be very
reliable. I used one for about 8 years and never had any problems at all with
mine. It sounds like these guys got a lemon machine.

------
speps
Related video :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w)

------
Isamu
This is great. They replace the software entirely, provide hardware schematics
and timing diagram for interfacing, figure out the font format and devise
their own fonts. Finally they add a driver to troff - I always wondered at the
Mergenthaler Linotron 202 being mentioned in the troff manual.

Note the cost of the Linotron 202 is implied to be relatively inexpensive at
$45k without options.

Ken Thompson wrote a disassembler on day one so they could examine the machine
code.

Read it! It's full of goodies.

~~~
dekhn
Production machine for $45K is a steal. Budgets at Bell were huge.

~~~
joezydeco
$45K in 1980, or $130K today.

------
dave2000
Reading about all the hardware problems they had getting a printer to work was
rather amusing. As I sit here waiting for the photocopier repair man to turn
up it's illuminating to contrast the giant steps which have taken place over
the last 40 odd years regarding the admittedly extremely difficult technical
problem of printing black text and images onto pieces of paper.

~~~
hackcasual
Amazing video on the history of photocopiers:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2NIAD5qn7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2NIAD5qn7E)

------
ATsch
Computerphile interviewed one of the writers of this paper in a series of
videos, who explained the brilliant and exiting history of this paper and its
recreation, as well as the history of Phototypesetters.

1\. [https://youtu.be/CVxeuwlvf8ww](https://youtu.be/CVxeuwlvf8ww) 2\.
[https://youtu.be/XvwNKpDUkiE](https://youtu.be/XvwNKpDUkiE) 3\.
[https://youtu.be/HdModNEK_1UU](https://youtu.be/HdModNEK_1UU)

~~~
acqq
In the description of the first video there is the link to the paper about
that recreation, it was published in 2013:

[http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf](http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf)

------
contingencies
I started reading about Condon and found he had no Wikipedia entry, so I
created one at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Henry_Condon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Henry_Condon)
... also the interesting historical engineering philosophy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_engineering)

------
cafard
I remember the 202, the sound of the photo paper feeding, and the cracking
sound the floppies made at certain times--was it when one was saving fonts to
them?

~~~
thawkins
I worked as a systems/software engineer at Linotype-Paul in Cheltenham UK,
which is where the 202 was designed and built. I worked on tbe hyphenation
programs on ut, and wrote a large part of the application used on the
Linoscreen 7000 book pagination terminal that was used to drive paginated
books into a 202. Tbe Linoscreen 7000 was a derivative of the Datek 7000,
aquired (including myself) from Datek systems in Wembly North London.
Mergenthaller was our US AGent. I used to have my own 202 taking up a full
third of my office. They where incredably reliable, so this story here is an
unusual tale. A definate lemon machine.

~~~
cafard
As you say, they were very reliable. I had a lot to do with 202s over several
years, and don't remember any problems that resulted from the 202 itself.

------
zurn
So did phototypesetters basically work like printers, or was the output just
used as a "master" to duplicate more copies of things like books using another
kind of machine?

~~~
cafard
The 202 ran out "galleys", photo paper maybe eight inches wide. The typical
workflow was a) typesetter at a keyboard enters the file, b) program maybe
tidies the file up for hyphenation & justification, c) galley run out and
proofread, d) corrections entered if needed, e) galleys cut up and pasted onto
cardboard pages, f) photographic negatives made from cardboard pages, g)
lithographic plates made from the negatives, h) the pages printed.

Items c and d could repeat a couple of times as necessary, and the customer
usually had a look at the product as well ("bluelines" produced from the
negatives).

------
Animats
About ten years earlier, in 1970, at Chi Corporation (a spinoff of CWRU) in
Cleveland, I used the prototype Harris Intertype phototypesetter. We were one
floor below the Harris Intertype Printing Equipment Research Center, and
they'd built the first CRT-based phototypesetter. It had a custom CRT one line
high and about 12 inches wide, which wrote letters onto photographic paper.
The photographic developer, with rollers and tanks of chemicals was built into
the machine, so it emitted developed pages. The machine was its own darkroom,
with a door so that people could walk inside. This was the prototype of what
became the Harris 7000.

Input was via a magnetic tape drive, and fonts were sequences of strokes. John
Langner at Chi wrote a program called Procrustes, which took in fonts in some
grid format and turned them into a sequence of vectors. There was no need for
reverse engineering; this was done with full cooperation from Harris
Intertype. There was also a primitive markup language and layout program, all
text-driven. All this ran on an UNIVAC 1108 mainframe. Tapes were written on
the mainframe and carried to the phototypesetter. The end result was quite
good. I still have some manuals printed from its masters.

We also had the first electrostatic printer, built by Clevite/Brush
Instruments.[1] This was a small machine which ran paper over a row of tiny
pins which could be turned on and off. This placed an electrostatic charge on
the slick coated paper, which was then pulled over a tank of liquid containing
toner. The toner was attracted to the charge, and was then somehow fused to
the paper. The result was more like dark grey on light grey than black on
white. Resolution was under 100DPI. This was a prototype.

Al Misek at Chi built a controller for the thing so that it could talk to the
1108. The controller had an early character generator, so it could print text
in one rather bad font. It could also do graphics, I wrote software to do 3D
plots with it, and still have some of the printouts. I think that's one of my
drawings in the Computerworld article [1]; my 3D graphing program was often
used as a demo.

Clevite/Brush didn't intend to build a printer. They built chart recorders
(like this [2]) to draw plots on paper from analog input data. (That's how you
recorded data from experiments and industrial processes back then.) Those
devices moved a pen back and forth mechanically, so they had very low
frequency response. The electrostatic printer technology was developed for a
faster chart recorder. Then someone realized it could do more than draw lines,
so they made up a prototype and let Chi use it.

Clevite never did much with that technology, but Versatec did, and for most of
the 1970s, electrostatic printers were a popular output device. Quality never
got very good, but the machines were fast and not too expensive. "Troff"
supported Versatecs.

[1]
[https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=849&dat=19700225&id=Q...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=849&dat=19700225&id=Q5obAAAAIBAJ&sjid=v1MEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6030,1625397&hl=en)

[2] [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Clevite-Brush-
Instruments-15-6327-10...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Clevite-Brush-
Instruments-15-6327-10-Mark-280-Recorder-AS-IS-/262113928622)

