Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu

Alan Perry aperry at snowmoose.com
Fri Jun 19 12:40:33 CDT 2020



On 6/17/20 1:27 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jun 17, 2020, at 3:25 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu
>>
>> 28min documentary on the last ever edition of the NY Times to be
>> printed using hot metal -- before they switched to what are now a
>> quite choice assortment of late-'70s minicomputers. I think I spotted
>> a PDP, a Data General and some IBM device, but I am no expert in this
>> era.
>>
>> As a veteran reader of Fredric Brown, especially "the Enchanted
>> Linotype", I have been using ETAOIN SHRDLU to win at Hangman for many
>> years... but I'd never seen one working before. It all still seems
>> like magic to me.
> 
> They should be fairly easy to find in printing musea.
> 

A friend of mine who was in Seattle collected this stuff. He had a 
couple Linotype/Intertype machines, a press, and lots and lots of 
magazines of type. It was set up in his garage and he would give demos 
of it in action. It was interesting how it worked. Unfortunately, he had 
to move out of the area for work and moving that stuff to another state 
was not feasible, so another local collector got it all.

There was another documentary on them, Linotype: The Film 
(https://linotypefilm.com).

alan


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