Great documentary: The Last Day of Hot Metal Typesetting at the New York Times

[archipirata]

Pretty fascinating

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/09/a-...ork-times/

[hal]

Awesome! I'll watch that tonight - thanks

Side By Side tells the story of the painful transition from analog to digital in the film industry. Really well done! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2014338/

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Were the printers on the staff deaf due to lead exposure?

[pdq]

Why was it hot metal typesetting? I thought the linotype machines just picked out the desired little metal characters in the order that it was typed in, and the page to print was thus built line-by-line.

Like Burgess Meredith the Devil on the Twilight Zone:

[cbelt3]

My BIL had a hot metal Linotype in his gold stamping business. He didn't use it that often. He used tin in it. It was a fascinating piece of machinery.

[D-Rod]

The Linotype put individual letter molds together as you typed, then After the line of type was set it would make a lead slug of the whole line of type. As it did this all the individual letter molds would be shuttled back to their respective place ready to be re used on another line of type.

[pdq]

Ah. Thanks for the explanation.

[JoeH]

I worked at a small print shop for a few years in the mid '70's. When I started in 1975 about a quarter to a third of the type was set in house on one of Linotype's competitors machines. When I left in 1978 I don't think they had powered one of them up in several months.

As it was, the type that was set was only used long enough to create a camera ready proof. Almost all of the printing done was offset printing and the proofs were used to create the plates.

[deckeda]

other old films here: https://vimeo.com/user4747369/videos

[Buzz]

I learned how to type on those linotype machines in in the early 1960's... screwed me royally when trying to re-learn how to type on a qwerty typewriter. Hometown buddy and I had a pretty good printing biz thru HS and part of college, until real life started kicking in. Typing/computing gave me fits until my neuro crud got so bad it didn't matter anymore, anyway, anyhow. Been huntin' and peckin' as the body allows ever since, and rely on speech to text for anything lengthy, so all I have to do is some editing. Those old school printing pieces always bring the memories flooding back.
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