Mechanizing typography has probably been one of the most important developments in our history. Anyone who decides to dig a little deeper into the subject will end up walking the halls of monotype and linotype, but in the fifties and sixties, photocomposition began to gain traction, thanks to advanced systems like the Linotron 505. It looks like it came out of an old science fiction movie, and it is obsolete by any modern standard, but that does not take away from its genius…
1969 gave us much more than the arrival on the Moon. It was also the year of the Soviet Venera program and its visits to Venus, the first Led Zeppelin album, the last public concert of the Beatles, the Football War, the original Scooby-Doo episode, Monty Python's Flying Circus, the birth of Unix, and honestly I could go on. But 1969, and the decade of the sixties in general, gave rise to very important changes in the field of typographic processing, courtesy of photocomposition. The introduction of the first computers allowed us to shatter records of speed and precision, and one of the systems that made that possible was the Linotron 505.
Linotron 505: Ahead of Its Time
This 14-minute mini documentary shares multiple technical details about the operation of the Linotron 505, its programming (via punched tape), and advanced capabilities such as creating "fake" italic, extended, or condensed letters, musical notation, and mathematical formulas.
The cathode ray tubes are logically critical components in the Linotron 505, combined with three special sixteen-element grids (lenses, character grid, and photomultipliers), but its manufacturer Mergenthaler indicated in the video that it was very economical to replace them (they resemble the tubes of old oscilloscopes and Motorola televisions).
If the entire manual process with multiple adjustments and calibration of the Linotron 505 gives you chills, imagine what that machine must be like on the inside. Someone was in charge of its maintenance, and I must admit that the loss of that knowledge causes me a bit of sadness, but at the same time it highlights how much we have progressed, with computers that are faster, more precise, more flexible, and more energy-efficient.
