Papers on hacking a typesetter

[Mauro Souza]

I was amused by the text, and by their log of errors too. The guys did the
unthinkable, making a better firmware to an undocumented device without
Google. And they write like they were mounting Lego bricks!

Mauro
http://mauro.limeiratem.com - registered Linux User: 294521
Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God.


2014/1/3 Jamon Camisso <jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>

> 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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