Digging through the New York Times morgue | Hacker News Reader

Digging through the New York Times morgue

buttondown.email

65 pointssecondary17 comments

Also this great article about Jeff Roth, the guy overseeing scanning and cataloging.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/insider/in-the-timess-mor...

Yeah, the OP writes "And before you ask: no, the contents of the morgue aren’t digitized…" A lot of the morgue has been; I saw a presentation a few years ago at a Strata Conference. What is true is a lot of the digitized materials aren't available to the public because the Times doesn't have to rights to do so.

He helped me with a research project and scanned some photos in. If you are a researcher and ask it seems like his office might help.

https://buttondown.imgix.net/images/eb9dbde1-8457-4080-b2ee-...

Is this a known style of photography? I've never seen an image like it and its very intriguing!

They just painted over the background around the subjects, for easier compositing later on. These days it's like a long press on your iPhone, but back in the day clipping was a tedious task.

This video, discussed on the blog, is a very fascinating memorialization of when NYT phased out linotype https://vimeo.com/127605643

Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31312035 - May 2022 (49 comments)

Etaoin Shrdlu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071164 - Nov 2021 (33 comments)

Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538028 - June 2020 (46 comments)

1978 – 'Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16907778 - April 2018 (2 comments)

Farewell – ETAOIN SHRDLU (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806072 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)

Farewell – ETAOIN SHRDL: The Last Day of Hot Metal Typesetting at the NY Times - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070183 - Nov 2016 (1 comment)

That film is fantastic.

Does anyone know what terminals they're using at the end? It looks like they have two types.

At lest one of the computers looks like it's some kind of Data General machine. There's also a shot of what looks like an IBM System 370 front panel like this one: (https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/7l79hs/ra..., https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10266809...).

Some newspapers in the 1970s used the Atex publishing system. The now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, a daily, used it when I worked there, roughly 1978 to 1980. The Atex system there relied on custom terminals--that is, supplied by Atex, not off-the-shelf from another manufacturer--and Atex terminals could be among those shown in the screenshots. Unfortunately, I don't remember much about how the Atex terminals looked, and (call me lazy) I haven't looked for photos.

Probably a Nova 1200 or something like that though there's a lot of other specialized equipment in that film as well.

ADDED: It wouldn't surprise me if the terminals were something specialized for the purpose. Pretty sure they're not DG terminals.

> Probably a Nova 1200 or something like that though there's a lot of other specialized equipment in that film as well.

I'm more interested in the terminals. Here are some screenshots from the movie of what I'm talking about: https://imgur.com/a/Vm0LGw4

Hmm. It looks like there are a couple of different models there.

I can't make out the specifics too clearly but they don't look to my eye like standard minicomputer terminals like DG would have sold. There are too many extra blocks of keys and lights.

FWIW, a few years later, the Post brought in a system that Raytheon designed for them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/10/06/p... So I'm guessing they're something either custom or from one of the early phototypesetting companies. This is pretty early days though. It was very common in the late 70s for editorial at small papers to still be working on typewriters and the final copy was re-inputed into phototypesetting equipment.

> So I'm guessing they're something either custom or from one of the early phototypesetting companies.

That was the clue I needed. I think I found a brochure describing somewhat later models.

The AM Verityper Comp/Set 4800 area composition terminal seems to have the same font and similar graphics capabilities of the integrated-keyboard terminal in the close ups:

https://archive.org/details/TNM_AMtext_425_word_processor_wi...

The AMtext 425 seems to have a similar keyboard layout to the two-piece terminals only seen in the wide shots:

https://archive.org/details/TNM_AMtext_425_word_processor_wi...

Looks like they were made by a company called AM Jacquard Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_Jacquard_Systems

The post has a interesting picture that shows correspondence between the screen display and printed output: https://creativepro.com/scanning-around-gene-back-when-types...

The student newspaper I worked for in the late 70s, we did all the front-end writing and editing on (manual) typewriters and then production staff typed into a big terminal that could output paper tape for the phototypesetter. It looked a lot like that ULTRASystem photograph. Pretty sure I remember the trackball.

(It may also have been hooked up directly through some franken-mess of an Imsai 8080 and other stuff.) Don't remember the details and I never used it directly. Headlines were typed into a different system.

Then everything was pasted up on a light-table.

I think we shot the negatives ourselves as well.

At the time, infrequent publications had someone like ourselves do the production work for them or farmed it out to some local company.

> It looked a lot like that ULTRASystem photograph.

I was a little confused, before I realized that name only appeared in one of photos. After trying to resolve my confusion, I found this, which appears to be a document from 1985 enumerating all these types of systems then in existence:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

It says the

> AM Varityper 4800 (a Harris 2200 product)

There's a few stock image of those in use at the Austin American-Statesman newspaper:

https://www.alamy.com/austin-texas-usa-circa-1980-newspaper-...

https://www.alamy.com/austin-texas-usa-circa1983-backshop-at...

The hardware is different than in the movie, but the software appears to be similar.

Scanning the document, I saw a mention of Interleaf, which some people at my employer were still using until recently (http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/Interleaf.htm). The comments on that page about the file format ring true, since we decided to not even try conversion and just have the users re-key their documents into our home-grown system for that content.

Compugraphic was another big company at the time. I think that was the manufacturer of our headline producing machine. (Another organization on the same floor used a much older and more manual machine for doing display text.) Don't know the system that did the body copy output.

The machine I was thinking of (Page 16 of the PDF https://grhpublic.s3.amazonaws.com/packaging_ebook_second.pd...) is similar but it's definitely different. Interesting that the trackball is on the left side.

Data General made some graphics display terminals. Judging from the rows of extra function keys they look very similar and some of the backend hardware also is DG.

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