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drfuchstoday at 1:31 PM2 repliesview on HN

Not so about the Linotype. Back in 1980, I personally ran the Alphatype CRS phototypesetter (bought by DEK for the purpose), in the basement of Margaret Jacks Hall, that produced the entire camera-ready copy of The Art Of Computer Programming, Volume II, Second Edition. The DVI files and Computer Modern fonts were created by the early, Sail-language, 36-bit versions of TeX and Metafont that were later redesigned and implemented to be more cross-platform. Knuth rewrote the firmware that resided on the Alphatype (in 8080 assembly language), and I wrote the code that translated from DVI and drove it from the DEC20 mainframe over a serial line (trickier than it sounds; see our joint paper "Optimal prepaging and font caching" ACM TOPLAS Vol 7 Issue 1).


Replies

wolfi1today at 5:17 PM

impressive. do you have written up that somewhere? I'm sure there are several people interested in the history of Metafont, TeX, etc.

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RajBhaitoday at 3:43 PM

This guy Fuchs.