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The Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile

Computerphile · 531.7K views · 2013-12-12 · 19:55

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Overview

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

On Hacker News

Recommended alongside the original paper and Unix history threads as an engaging account of the typesetter hack.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2024

Topics

History of computingGraphic design & typography
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linotron 202typesettingbell labstroffunix history

What people said

jgalt212 · 2024-07 · Recommendation

> As one might expect, Bell Labs didn't use the paper tape input tangentially related. The Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile [VIDEO] staring the inimitable Professor Brailsford.

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ATsch · 2015-11 · Recommendation

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. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK]

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leoc · 2020-11 · Reference

0:16:40 For those who haven't seen it before, there's a Computerphile video [VIDEO] (related video: [LINK] ) about the hacking of the typesetting machine, a Mergenthaler Linotron 202. 0:24:31 The photo must be the one at [LINK] (probably the webpage, on Dennis Ritchie's old website, that made it famous recently).

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Sources

Video by Computerphile, played through YouTube.

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