The Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile

[@babis8142]

Just noticed in the beginning of the video it says and at the end I'm pleased

[@JulianIlett]

I used to repair the 202. Floppy disk alignments, CRT alignments and even the occasional software patch using hand-punched paper tape. It had a very heavy PSU - it was no fun carrying that up 3 flights of stairs.

[@SyphistPrime]

Looking at old tech just makes you appreciate how far we've come.

[@LMacNeill]

Anyone younger than 30 years old just has no clue how difficult it used to be to get specific fonts printed. I'm 43, and I started my computer career in the mid 1980s -- certainly an easier time than the 1970s that Professor Brailsford is speaking about, but still far more difficult than today. True Type fonts simply did not exist. Your printer had to have the fonts built-in -- you had to buy specific (and very expensive) font-cartridges that contained the fonts, and then the software had to recognize those cartridges to be able to utilize the fonts. And the fonts could not be "infinitely" sized -- they had only specific sizes built-in. True Type Fonts are one of the best things ever invented, and all this work that these gentlemen did back in the late '70s is the earliest step taken along that path. Without their work, and the subsequent work of others that followed in their footsteps, printing would still be an EXTREMELY expensive, time-consuming, and difficult process.

[@thepumpkingking8339]

LMacNeill Coming form the Stationery side in the early 90's . I Remember the changeable Daisy Wheel's with different fonts. So even into the 90's .. The Font Issue, as we have it today. Still had not been resolved.

[@0pyrophosphate0]

Can we just have an 8 hour livestream of the professor telling stories?

[@bigun402]

This gentleman that is in this video needs to voice children movies. Can I purchase him to be my grandpa? Does he voice any books on tapes? I think I smelled roses and saw a unicorn just listening to his voice.

[@ZeedijkMike]

Yes he does have a very pleasant voice.

[@picosdrivethru]

+Zeedijk Mike I totally agree. He timbre is quite lovely.

[@MartijnvandeStreek]

This is a great piece of Unix/typesetting history! :) Modern "man" pages (manual pages) on Unix and Unix-like systems are still written in the language that's described here (troff/nroff), and they're easy to typeset/print or display in a terminal window.

[@gulllars4620]

I'd love more videos from Professor Brailsford. I've watched all videos on computerphile, and there are many interesting people in the videos, but Professor Brailsford is without a doubt the best story teller. I love how he makes stories about very specific historic technical challenges come to life. I wonder what he thinks about typing on keyboards, specifically layouts (qwerty, dvorak, etc), and mechanical keyboards vs rubber dome or other types of key switches.

[@kevinwynott7755]

This gentleman has the absolute BEST Voice......I'm not even into computer tech.....I just enjoy hearing him speak!

[@Disthron]

....This guy is like the David Attenborough of computing history! XD

[@BertGrink]

+Disthron It's quite funny you should say that, because i was thinking of David's brother Richard, while i was watching this video.

[@TechyBen]

"But why would you want to do that. No one wants to do that." Famous last words in business. Famous beginnings for successful new starts.

[@capt-morgan276]

Best professor on computerphile!

[@un2mensch]

After this video, Dave Brailsford has gone from awesome guru to fucking legend in my mind. I loved this video so hard.

[@DaithiDublin]

Excellent video! I worked in print for several years in the 90's with some older guys who had been in the business 20 or 30 years at that stage. Man, could those guys talk about fonts and typsetting and composition! Fascinating subject.

[@HarleyPebley]

Wow. I used to work on a Merg 202. It was a cool bit of kit in the day; a big step up from the previous generation of typesetters. My dad headed a team at a commercial printshop that interfaced it to a DG Nova computer to bypass the paper tape input. Fun times.

[@davidnixon4509]

As someone who worked at both Mergenthaler's UK affiliate Linotype Paul 1978-79 and also at Bell Labs 1980-1990 this was a fascinating video and I can attest to the lack of quality in the Mergenthaler software of the time. I never worked on the 202 but I did work on its big brother the Linotron 606. There was an interesting problem on the 606 called "character breakup" where seemingly at random and out of the blue small sections of text would intermittently display as if the letters had been chopped up in a blender. It was never repeatable and never the same section of text. Some senior developers had been tasked with finding the problem but had failed to do so and there was speculation it might be a hardware problem or possibly a timing problem. I was working on a customer site commissioning a new installation of 606s and we saw the problem. With the help of the 606 hardware engineer we found the cause was a software bug that only got executed when there was a disk read error transferring the font data from disk into the memory used by the CRT to display the text. So the data was reread from disk but because of the bug the data was placed at an offset address to where it should be so the characters displayed would be part of one character and part of another more or less depending on how many bytes each character used. Solving that was the most interesting thing I did at Linotype. The most interesting thing I did at Bell Labs was attending John Horton Conway's talks, and the second most interesting was hacking the curses library version of the Aliens game to play Pacman on our terminals.

[@clearmenser]

This extreme level of academic geekary is impressive to say the least. Wow, also wow, and wow.

[@TheTrueRandomness]

Reading the original complaint letter is totally worth the time... This is one of my favourite parts so far: "Lyle R, our (by now regular) repairman, suggested wiggling the chips [sic] on the code converter board. This apparently nonsensical suggestion in fact cured the problem for a while. Thursday, July 26: The same chip-wiggling exercise became necessary every few hours, from this day forward"

[@TheTrueRandomness]

Friday, August 3: The machine died finally; no amount of chip-wiggling had any effect. Sunday, August 5: The machine spontaneously cured itself, at least for a while.

[@JuanPabloCarbajal]

The original memo uses a very scientific statement about the 202 machine: "considerable pain in the posterior"

[@BenjaminCavileer]

I started printing in the dot matrix generation. I've had a fair share of font problems in my life, and now I understand where it all comes from. Youve filled a gap in my knowledge of printing history. I wish I was there alongside those guys, hacking that 202.

[@Hyreia]

I loved listening to this guy gush about the typeset printer. The energy in the way he describes the parts and describes how it works really sells me on just how impressive the technology was for its time beyond just his words in text would.

[@immortal_coil]

I love watching the videos with Professor Brailsford!

[@HennerZeller]

Bravo! As a typographile and believer in naturally being able to get the full access to the sourcecode of machines you purchased and *own*, I enjoyed this description of a historic jailbreak very much. About 30 years ago, when this reverse-engineering happened, the dark ages of vendor secrecy and proprietary closed source just began, and we're in an even deeper shit nowadays. This is when I am very thankful for people such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds that played key roles in showing the world that keeping software accessible for you to learn from, improve upon and share is creating a tremendous value for society: GNU/Linux is by far the most common operating system deployed today (most notably in places many people don't realize such as phones, appliances, routers or datacenters of essentially all big internet companies ...)

[@rich1051414]

It's story's like the 202 jailbreak which really puts into perspective how much the 'open source' ideology meant to the unix team.

[@StuartPetty]

Please never stop making these videos, there great, many thanks

[@Tom-lf5og]

04:06 "smelly developer" ... at first I was like... "what ? like a PHP developer ?" But then I realized he was referring to the chemical LOL :)

[@MatthewPotter]

All that font recreation reminds me of when I was at Yellow Pages Group and needed to convert Inuit font families into opentype for the new platform we were releasing. Not only was it a completely unknown language to me but the glyphs were also not roman based nor pictographic. On top of that there were, as with your chess piece trick, zero width glyphs that acted like accents. Luckily I had PDFs to start from that I was able to capture the vector from but going through for the spacing and proper unix character tables took ages to do. Great video!

[@joshcryer]

Are you effin' kidding me? They jailbroke the thing, reverse engineered it, then, as a hobby, at a whim, they REPRODUCED THE ORIGINAL MEMO BY REVERSE ENGINEERING A PHOTOCOPY. That's some inception level hacking there. God I love this guy.

[@TheEvertw]

I remember the first time I saw a computer print out a non-built-in character. I was awe struck. I must have been either 19 or 20. The printer was a dot-matrix printer that turned out to have a "graphical" mode where you could print bitmaps. I did play with it a little trying to output PCB etching masks, but soon gave up and went back to hand-drawing them. I greatly admire the perseverance of these people!

[@Diachron]

Fascinating bit of history. Thank you for all the effort to authentically restore the memo!

[@abcde_fz]

Wow. I cannot believe this. I went to a computer tech school back when such things were almost the BEST way into early computer tech work. Control Data Institute. Thank god. Never would have made it through four years of what passed for computer tech college back in '85. And just now, reading the Vacation Memo, I am astounded to find out that something that the memos authors found a nonsensical, that turned out to slightly ameliorate a problem they were having with the 202, would have been a totally common suggestion coming out of MY mouth, back in those days. "Wiggle the chips" "What? Wiggle the chips?" "YES, dude, you're a PHD electrical engineer. You're dealing with a bunch of little non-heat-sinked IC chips probably pressed into a PCB board, WITHOUT BEING SOLDERED IN!!! Where some of those chips MAY have the character bit maps on them." (OK, I am confabulating a little. Some VRTs stored their character maps as little arrays of timing blips or whatever-the-hells in chips. Address that array on that chip, and that array gets sent to the CRT, the array ends up being a letter "A" when scanned out. Work with me here...) "So where do you THINK an annoying little not-quite-permanent sorta-intermittent problem WOULD live on a PCB full of 16-pin press-fit IC's???" IF it's software, it's yours, debug it. If it's hardware, it's likely to be quite cyclical in nature, and highly reproducible, but if it's FIRMWARE, and that WARE is spread across mulitiple PCB's, (Naked Mini?), then wiggle the damn chips. You probably won't HURT anything, and you might well fix that annoying little not-quite-permanent sorta-intermittent problem. Can't believe I just MIGHT have given a little advice to someone like Brian Kernighan, if I'd been working for Merganthaler at that time. I already knew who HE was. I wasn't nobody! :)

[@fllthdcrb]

Fascinating bit of history here. I like it. I had no idea typesetting was _that_ much of a hassle back in the day. Seems rather shortsighted of Mergenthaler, though. But then I suppose that reflects a common attitude of companies at the time. One irritating little technical problem: the oblique camera angles on these documents, combined with the low depth of field, makes them pretty hard to look at. I wonder if something can be done about that in the future.

[@ThatNateGuy]

I could listen to Professor Brailsford speak all day.

[@Seegalgalguntijak]

Wow, computer science must be the only field of science where you could be an actual scientist with the up-to-date technologies and then later on become a historian and talk about things no one knows a thing any more... ;-)

[@Madsy9]

This is an actual problem in my opinion. Proprietary software and libraries/APIs die off and the documentation with it. Not only does it make maintenance of old software difficult, we lose a big chunk of our history and culture every time it happens. Imagine how important SGI was in the field of computer graphics when they made the first OpenGL API. Those first library specifications are all gone, as well as most of the documentation on WGL. Imagine what we lose whenever computer games become abandonware, when no one has the source code anymore and the game wasn't selected for preservation. Games that have filled people's lives with joy and meaning just suddenly vanish to be forgotten forever. A few dedicated groups in the world collect old C64 and Atari games exactly to preserve an important part of our (pop)-culture.

[@Seegalgalguntijak]

***** I think that is a learning curve the world has to take, until every code is free (as in open, "free speech", not necessarily as in "free beer").

[@thecassman]

Great video! I'm sure i'm not alone in saying that all videos should be this long!! 10 minutes isn't always long enough to fit all of the info into it - if this video was halved in length it wouldn't have covered anywhere near enough.

[@utopialabsvideos9408]

Adding to a comentary below: I didn't watch many of your videos in Computerphile because they were so short. But I think now, with a length of 15 or more minutes, videos are more enjoyable. I love Computer Science history and I love that Computerphile does these videos long enough to enjoy and dream about old times... Thanks, Computerphile! You're like my "nerd Netflix" now!

[@coomcake]

$50,000 in 1979 is the equivalent to about $160,550 today

[@cats_know_everything_about_you]

In 1981 my mum worked at Hove greyhound track typesetting their programmes on a similar machine -- an Addressograph Multigraph. It was much more primitive than the 202: the CRT was replaced by a spinning disk with characters on it, and a light shone through the disk onto the bromide, exposing one character at a time. Changing fonts meant unscrewing the disk! The results were impressive, though, and I still remember the smell of developer and fixer as the long strip of bromide lay drying on the floor, waiting to go next door to have offset plates made. Laser printers just make it too easy!

[@AlexZenla]

+Computerphile I could listen to Professor Brailsford all day. He is my favorite person on all the Brady channels, second is Professor Poliakoff.

[@jlinkels]

Very nice presentation. I have read the vacation memo with much pleasure. Those were the days that disassembly was still a feasible means to understand how a device worked. And not to forget building a piece of hardware to interface a PDP11 to an external device.

[@jacderida]

Excellent stuff. This guy is so interesting, I could listen to him all day!

[@steevee1945]

I love hearing this man tell his stories.

[@dawidrozmus301]

I love all of your videos. It is great that you interview people that walked their talk!

[@HKragh]

I just love this channel. And Professor Brailsford!

[@daedra40]

Only 2 minutes into the video, I had a feeling I'm going to get something extraordinarily great. Thanks professor, and everyone else, these videos are indeed a pleasure :D

[@Gabbos]

Amazing! I love longer more indepth videos like this. Keep it up!

[@Galakyllz]

Wow, this video was very good. I love when you delve into historical aspects of computing.

Wow, this brings back some memories! I really enjoyed this episode! I so so so remember these fonts, printing like this and in one space I was in practically hallucinating via the chemicals, then cut and paste, then Xerox, etc. (those were the days!)

[@gerbermarks]

As an nroff/troff user since 1978, I found this fascinating. At a university department (AGSM at UNSW, Sydney), we didn't have a 202 (and so used nroff rather than troff before 1986), but come the first laser printers, we fell on troff. I still use groff for _all_ my text processing.

[@Quarter2830]

Absolutely brilliant storytelling of little known happenings and photography. I dig the bird shadows on the blinds and the subtle lens flares.

[@MinecreftTakeover]

I could listen to this guy talk for days

[@TheRogerx3]

I was a courier for a linotronic bureau in the early eighties, I did find this faciniating.

[@Herrisx]

As always, Prof. Brailsford is amazing! Thank you!

[@1DJLNR]

these video's are what i love youtube for and only these types of video's. memory lane!!

[@FlipJanson_]

Is there any way we can get the recreated Print Out font? Not any real purpose, but because I like to look at it.

[@3snoW_]

I love the videos with Professor Brailsford! Keep up the good work!

[@TheDarkerPath]

Love it! The longer format is great - more please :)

[@powmod1]

Jesus! I never thought printing fonts would be so complicated...

[@chrisharrison763]

Although I really like Tom Scott, Professor Brailsford is the real anchor of this channel. Excellent.

[@BeCurieUs]

Ha, only a C coder would call a link a pointer, love this channel :D

[@alpenwasser6869]

Very awesome video, wouldn't mind more of this sort. 20 mins is a pretty good length IMO, allowing for more detail than the usual ~10 without being ridiculously long.

[@666Tomato666]

and there I was thinking that I couldn't have any more respect to the UNIX guys... awesome story

[@shkolarac]

"web pointers" - such nice way to say link :)

[@BS-bd5uq]

As a student learning type design, this piece of history almost makes me cry.

[@TheKuleluke]

computerphile is awesome

[@voveve]

You could do a PreiodicVideos on developing photos/this kind of prints!

[@nekaiionera]

Fantastic video! I love bits of history like this.

[@frankharr9466]

I like the typesetting histories.

[@barefeg]

every video should be this long

[@FreeFallForFive5]

Amazing video! Great work on the font professor Brailsford!

[@NATESOR]

I won't feel so bad about playing videogames when i hear this genius of a man spent 100+ hours messing around with minor details on a font

[@SetMyLife]

VERY interesting! Thank you for sharing such a jewel of stories!

[@aameen951]

I have a request for a video: "Splines and Bezier Curves"

[@ChallengeTheNarrative]

Appreciation of old tech, I am in my element :-)

[@JonMasters]

What's a good academic text with more of the history of typography/fonts, Dave, Steve?

[@JonMasters]

Chris Chapman or Steven Bagley hopefully have some recommendations...

[@wesmatron]

In 1973 my parents bought their nice house in a nice area for £4000 (Probably about $8000 at the time). Your $50,000 printer would have bought you a mansion in the 1970s.

[@MarcelJEMol]

Funny, I did not know this story. But I did something similar in around 1985/86 as a student project at the Technical University of Delft where we wanted to setup our own fonts on I think a Xerox printer in use at that time. We managed to crack the code (with help of a few other people in the Uk I believe) and created a font to print out the TUDelft logo.

[@tarcal87]

Not gonna lie, I understood maybe 10% of it, but I was watching it in awe, seeing how enthusiastic he is about the past. Must be amazing to be (to have been) his student

[@ericsbuds]

new video! how exciting!!

[@jamesusespivot]

Sorry for the question but I'm too young. What is a typesetter?

[@Computerphile]

might be worth watching the 'extra bits' film as this is a background on typesetting and how the 'typesetter' machines evolved... >Sean

[@giulianobernardi4500]

Great video about a very fascinating story. Thanks for sharing!

[@parttroll1]

Ah the Sicilian defence my favourite opening for black

[@prajnaprajna1923]

Attention: Only (N+). Fermat's last Theorem z ^ 3 = x ^ 3 + y ^ 3 is capable exists a solution if fully meet the following conditions: First step: (1+2+3+4+........+a)^2+(1+2+3+4+........+b)^2=v^2. In fact, using the computer, this equation has the ability to survive. Second step: (1+2+3+4+........+a+1)^2+(1+2+3+4+........+b+1)^2=s^2. Third step: v=1+2+3+4+........+c. In fact, using the computer, this equation has the ability to survive. Fourth step: s=1+2+3+4+........d. Fifth step: d=c+1 If all five steps are satisfied.This equation is capable of existence. [z(z+1)/2]^2 - [z(z-1)/2]^2=[x(x+1)/2]^2- [x(x-1)/2]^2+[y(y+1)/2]^2 - [y(y-1)/2]^2. Because: z^3=[z(z+1)/2]^2 - [z(z-1)/2]^2. Mean this equation is capable of existence. z^3=x^3+y^3. However, too hard to satify all five equations in same time.. And more: Attention about series of number: 1,3,6,10,15,21,28,36,45........ Recognize: 10 and 15 are two number consecutive which belong this string. Having: 15^2 - 10^2=5^3. Or: z^3=[z(z+1)/2]^2 - [z(z-1)/2]^2. Impossible in same time exist both: [z(z+1)/2]^2=[x(x+1)/2]^2+[y(y+1)/2]^2 And [z(z-1)/2]^2=[x(x-1)/2]^2+[y(y-1)/2]^2 Attention: All numbers as z(z+1)/2 and x(x+1)/2 and y(y+1)/2 and z(z-1)/2 and x(x-1)/2 and y(y-1)/2 are belong this string and they are Pythagorean. This is main proof: z^3=[z(z+1)/2]^2 - [z(z-1)/2]^2 Define: x

[@Exevium]

You didn't do too bad at all :) Even with todays tools, I'd have trouble recreating some of the new fonts. Very impressive, very cool 80's computertech, awesome vid :)

[@unvergebeneid]

Funny how the 2D graphics of that time had the same restrictions as today's 3D graphics and in fact because we have so awesome 3D hardware compared to 2D these days, even 2D games tend to have circles that are actually visibly comprised of line segments. I wonder when this will finally end and we'll have proper curves in 2D _and_ 3D.

[@smegskull]

Curves are actually easier to do on analogue systems than on digital systems so we are kind of headed in the wrong direction for that at the moment.

[@unvergebeneid]

smegskull Well, I'd be fine with using pixels as long as the object description itself wasn't restricted to polygons. All you need for that is computing power, lots of it. I think the next step we're going to see is real-time raytracing and it's about time. I'm sick of plasticky leaves that block all sunlight. But after that, I hope solid models will come back on the table (especially since raytracing would mean that it suddenly becomes important what's _inside_ of volumes).

[@MonophonicSurround]

We have curves in 2D and curve-segments in 3D for a long time already. Example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_surface

[@unvergebeneid]

MonophonicSurround I'm talking about real-time 3D. And regarding curves in 2D ... well, I was referring to the video.

[@smegskull]

yes but you cant draw it. this is the problem with pixels. with analogue images like oscilloscopes you can draw actual curves.

[@brianpso]

This story was so cool, this guy got so many good histories =D

[@momlulu66]

Fascinating. Thank you for making this video

[@SpiderWeb1965]

Great video. Also, both papers made for excellent reading.

[@iabervon]

Were you missing the 202 version of Printout? Because I'd have thought that the obvious solution would have been to write a 202-to-TrueType converter, since you've got the (reverse-engineered) specs for the 202 font. I think it would be particularly pleasing to restore an old document by following the instructions in the very document you're restoring.

[@DrSteveBagley]

We'd have love to have done it that way (and it was my preferred way to recreate the chess font as well). Unfortunately, none of us could track down the original data files of either despite searching. Even if we had been able to get hold of the font, the chances are they would have been on some archaic media (probably 8" floppies) using an unknown disk structure so there's no certainty we would have been able to read the files off the media and onto my mac to write a converter… And that's assuming the disks/tape would be in a fit state to even play. That's the other side of this story really, how quickly things fall becoming inaccessible even if you have a copy of it. There's an interesting question to be answered about how we archive documents digitally so they don't become inaccessible.

[@alpha12orc]

I would've liked if you had gone more into detail on how you reverse engineered it.

[@MegaPeers]

Great story! Must have been awsome to ne part of the beginning of the computer era.

[@MrGoatflakes]

I don't understand (at 5:02 currently). Surely they had the Xerox photocopier. Why not just expose the drum of a Xerox to that lovely 900dpi cathode tube?

[@jellevm]

That was really cool!

[@blenderpanzi]

Isn't troff what is still used for manpages?

[@SubThiel]

Haha, I read the support messages in the original document. First of an endless of support cases hitting printer manufactures. Like the big bang, but with printers :D Thx for a great video, really interesting stuff.

[@RonJohn63]

The Xerox 9700 laser printer (which did *not* fit on the desktop!) was released in 1977.

[@ElectricEvan]

Thank you so much for making this!

[@Wzymedia]

These are some of the people we should be revered as saints or celebrated as heroes

[@jdgrahamo]

It is extremely difficult to create a type-face that looks anywhere near acceptable. There are all sorts of optical illusions, which vary according to the point size, as well as the flexibility needed to produce bold and italic versions, numerals, caps and lower-case et al.

[@joshuaunderwood7]

Amazing video.

[@robbiep742]

Needs more comic sans

[@HubrisInc]

Any chance Prof. Brailsford has released Printout as a ttf for people to install on their home computers?