Imagine a gas powered desktop publishing system that weighed several
tons,leaked oil, had thousands of moving parts, its own boiler full of molten
lead and a keyboard where you couldn’t see what you had typed and which
looked a thousand times more strange and complicated than any deliberately
anachronistic ‘Steampunk’ PC casemod neo punk device.
This is how the machines that laid out the pages of newspapers were till the 1980's, and to give you some idea of how recent this technology was used, they were manufactured until after the release of the Apple computer.
Linotype had a virtual monopoly on the typesetting of newspapers for a hundred years and their design is a superb example of an endlessly refined solution to what became an anachronistic problem.
Linotypes were unlike any keyboard driven device, before or since. Next time, you wienies complain about the complexities of setting type on a Mac, remember these beasts, just back behind the corner, barely an arms lengths away. When I was a student we had to learn how to both use and maintain them. Naked. on fire, while running. OK not naked.
1 comment:
that must've been a brutal experience that i'm not sure i'm glad or not glad i didn't get to go through.
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