Typesetters in the '80s - Computerphile

What I gather from all of the videos I've watched is that Professor Brailsford is not only a super special kinda guy but also a goldmine of history and know-how. He's one in a million! The greatest thing about him, which I noticed a few months ago, and pointed out to a friend of mine, is that he can maintain on a long monologue without requiring a bunch of quick edits to filter out superfluous thoughts. He's concise and thorough, going indepth, and following a coherent train of thought at a healthy pace. EDIT: All of his videos are a real treat!

Are there any surviving 202s?

why in the hell would god write down electrodynamics in spherical coordinates??
more importatnly, why would he not use 4-vector / tensors spacetime notations...

In 1982 I was an engineering grad student when we took delivery of a 300DPI Xerox laser printer.  It was promptly connected to a VAX-11/780 running VMS and TeX 1.0 (aka TeX82).  Ease of publishing increased by an order of magnitude almost over night.

I was a typesetter in the 1980s - Compugrapgic MCS Powerview 5

Did that video that says coming soon at the end ever come out?

I wonder how did the big printing houses produce the math handbooks I had always known about. Why didn't you use whatever proven workflow they had developed? Even if that meant lead types.

I'm a physical chemist, but I'm addicted to Computerphile now!  I always watched Periodic and Numberphile, but I love these videos! 

It's "80s". Apostrophes are not used for pluralization.

This may be the nerdiest video... ever! Quite delightful.

Awesome!

Do you think we could get Maxwell's equations on Numberphile?

Sadly, all I get is grey screens of nothing when trying to access the eprg(dot)org links. Great video nonetheless though :-)

Thank you for your web pointer, I shall process it through the series of tubes as soon as I disembark from my automobile excursion.

This is the problem with making things for other people.

Apple product placement?

I'd love to see a video about the history of Tex and LaTex, since I'm currently learning it for my Bachelor thesis. And I started to love it, after seeing some fellows failing hard at msOffice.

Dont pick ur nose prof ! @ 10.00, LOL
Another fantastic vid sir

I wonder if Professor Brailsford ever met Don Knuth...

Ab-so-lute-ly love this stuff. Many thx.

I noticed that whoever wrote the brochure typed in Zolig instead of Zilog in the processor list; whee, typos.

Bell Labs and Unix changed everything...

But really good printing quality for this time...
700 dpi are very impresive.

as a student of software engineering i find this channel absolutely fantastic... the people involved all seem to be not only great scientists in their relevant fields, but also great teachers...
i also really like these history videos... being in my 20s now i never really experienced this kind of thing and the early years of computing and this is just so fascinating and something you dont really get in school

thank you so much :)

Gaussian units... ARGH...

Funny that this video comes up today, as I've been playing Type:Rider.

It's funny when you think about the human life and context. I find this gentleman fascinating and would buy him a beverage every day to hear him talk about this (or his other experiences).

His wife, as is usually the case, must be sick of hearing about it. :)

Just at the start, i want to say that it's pretty difficult to not like whatever the prof has to say. Simply.

Excellent video...love the poster. I would love to buy a Computerphile T-shirt with that on the back!!

I want to buy that poster!!!

You could ask the same question about regular text.

and to think that I was able to write similar quality notes during my university coursework using LaTeX system just few years ago...

This is fascinating. You don't appreciate how amazing it is to be able to click print and have a reasonable copy pop out of a machine without the history behind it.

You know, I just went through and typeset my resume.  I think I did a good job, as it looks a lot like my old resume, but far more consistent.  Thank you, guys at LaTeX!

Are we going to get a video on TeX and LaTeX at some point?

I love this man... reminds me of my grandpa telling stories of coding in Basic.

most dramatic hacking tales on the internet

He is a very good narrator, even better that he talks about historical problems and solutions. Computer history is very entertaining for me.

cool stuff

What!? Why on earth would you go to all of that effort to get the printer to work!? Come on, now. Those are only a list of mathematical equations; they weren't graphs or artistic styluses; why on earth would you need to use a printer to get these images when they are only a list of mathematical equations? If they're only printed-out mathematical equations, then surely being hand-written is good enough??

so HD has been around since the 80s. huh!

Wasn't TeX already developed in the late 1970s? How then isn't it even mentioned in a video on typesetting in the 1980s?

The advent of computer printing more or less sounded the death knell for letter spacing, which nobody seems to bother with any more. A great retrograde step in design, I fear.

Excellent, thank you.

Awesome :D

Haha, "Zolig Z80" xD

what a great story again! i believe i can listen a whole day to this guy. he can tell it with real passion, something which i admire

This man has the greatest voice I have ever heard.

Seriously, has he ever done any acting or voice work?

I'm pretty sure I saw that t-shirt in a Modern Family episode (worn by Alex).