Before laser-printers, high quality print-outs were the domain of typesetters, expensive and tightly controlled. In 1979 a Bell Labs team reverse engineered one in their summer vacation. Professor Brailsford has the details.

EXTRA BITS - More on Printing and Typesetting History:    • EXTRA BITS - Printing and Typesetting...  
Mainframes and the Unix Revolution:    • Mainframes and the Unix Revolution - ...  

To find out how the 1980 Bell Labs `vacation memo' was completely rebuilt,
in 2013, visit:

http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf

If you want to see the `vacation memo' itself -- in its original scanned-in form and after being rebuilt -- then visit:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202

The memorandum gives an outline of how the `reverse engineering' of the 202 was accomplished.

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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: http://bit.ly/nottscomputer

Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at: http://bit.ly/bradychannels