I wonder what next transition looked like to them. I imagine the most significant change was moving from paste ups to digital layouts in the 90s.
Edit: well it's just a terminal not a full PC but seems to be model 1746? That's the closest shot https://i.imgur.com/mGlb2va.png
There was another panel with somebody flipping what looked more like Digital Equipment Corp. switches. Normally, you would do that only when booting the machine: you would put in a program by setting switches for a few words in memory -- set, store, set, store,... -- and run that to read in and run a paper tape that itself had just enough code to read and run a boot sector from disk, and off you went.
The notion of buying expensive, read-only memory useful only when you boot was absurd. (You needed the paper tape reader anyway.)
Often there was a stick with notches for the switches. You would flip all the switches up and push the stick against them, pushing some down, and store, then rotate the stick and do it again. Cheap ROM. The program to read paper tape was very short.
I wonder what happened to all this machinery in the end? It was mentioned that it would be auctioned, but I can't imagine the buyer continued to operate this process for much longer. It would be nice to think that they're still operational in a museum somewhere, albeit without the scale and pressure of deadlines.
Perhaps it was exported to countries that couldn't afford the latest technology?
There is for example a coal mine in Bosnia that is known among train enthusiasts, because it uses steam locomotives from WWII.
https://www.farrail.com/pages/touren-engl/bosnia-kriegslok-s...
> Perhaps it was exported to countries that couldn't afford the latest technology?
In 1978 that could been happened. By the '90s nobody would bother, though.
All that talk of hot lead made me wonder how many workers in there suffered some form of lead poisoning:
Vimeo: https://files.catbox.moe/2jzh3z.png
Archive.org: https://files.catbox.moe/470r44.png
https://vimeo.com/127605643 (you can download the raw source upload with yt-dlp)
I'm grateful to the producers of this film for conserving the historic knowledge. Makes me wonder how many areas have gone that were similarly fascinating where no such video was made.
Each disk looks the size of a vinyl record, and there are a whole stack of them in a disk pack.
If you attend any large news site and search for "test" you will find those scraps as evidence of prior CMSs. Like chicago tribune "joe assembler test 1" or latimes "now testing assembler and p2p" or cnn "this is a developer test"
Typical newspapers might use a screen with 80 dots per inch because they are running very fast and using cruddy paper. Art printers on shiny clay paper use much finer screens and get results approaching the original prints.
Side Note: I could have started my working life in newsprint as when I were a lad, just out of school in the late 70's and being mad keen on radio and electronics, I applied for a job (didn't get it) as a teleprinter technician at the local newspaper (Doncaster Free Press). These were the electro-mechanical teletypes running 24/7 to capture news "on the wires". I thought I'd be in with a shot as I had my own Creed 7B clacking away in my bedroom - when allowed by my long suffering, but enabling parents!
Etaoin Shrdlu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071164 - Nov 2021 (33 comments)
Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538028 - June 2020 (46 comments)
English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20541263 - July 2019 (10 comments)
1978 – 'Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16907778 - April 2018 (2 comments)
Farewell – ETAOIN SHRDLU (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806072 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)
Farewell – ETAOIN SHRDL: The Last Day of Hot Metal Typesetting at the NY Times - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070183 - Nov 2016 (1 comment)
Etaoin shrdlu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958143 - July 2015 (1 comment)
