Papers on hacking a typesetter

[Jamon Camisso]

On 02/01/14 02:22 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> This is a historical piece on a Bell Labs experience in hacking on a typesetter.
> 
> That it combines serious matters with matters whimsical may be gleaned
> from the title:
> 
> Experience with the Mergenthaler Linotron 202 Phototypesetter, or, How
> We Spent Our Summer Vacation.
> 
> http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/
> 
> Paper by Joe Condon, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson, written in
> 1980, I suspect produced on said typesetter.
> 
> Further entertainment comes from a subsequent paper that describes the
> process of reconstructing the initial paper so that it could be read
> using modern means (e.g. - as a well-formed PDF document).

I wish I had a tenth as much broad understanding of the systems as the
authors. I mean, everything from hardware to reverse engineering
proprietary floppy filesystems, using a PDP11 for a bootloader (awesome
that), figuring out a proprietary font engine & encodings, to writing
their own fonts in vectors, playing with chip timings.

Sure systems are probably more complex now than they were then, but what
they managed to pull off in getting the typesetter to work with their
own fonts even is remarkable, nevermind commandeer the font loading
program to load other programs or fonts.

'When hackers could hack' should be the title!

Cheers, Jamon
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