Steve Yelvington on Nostr: Gannett used tape-punching tech to separate keyboarding from Linotype machine ...
Gannett used tape-punching tech to separate keyboarding from Linotype machine operation, speed up the system, cut costs, and allow centralization of what we would now call data entry. Wire services eventually followed, setting up Teletypesetting services that sent stories as data neatly formatted for standard column widths, including hyphenation and justification.
There were no computers then, of course. The data was transmitted over phone lines using signals broken into 6-bit codes in a standard called TTS. At the receiving end, the signals generated both typewritten copy readable by humans, and punched tape that could be fed to the Linotypes.
You may know that 6 bits can only represent 64 possibilities (2 to the 6th power). That's not enough characters. Shift, Unshift, Upper Rail and Lower Rail were used to enable majuscule (capital) and minuscule (little bitty) letters, and font changes such as bold or italic.
Accents? Diacritics? Nope. Not in the codeset. Not in the font magazine either. A Linotype could cast them, if properly equipped for the task, but they weren't in the least-common-denominator world where newspaper production lived.
So stylebooks of wire services and major newspapers simply said: don't use them.
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There were no computers then, of course. The data was transmitted over phone lines using signals broken into 6-bit codes in a standard called TTS. At the receiving end, the signals generated both typewritten copy readable by humans, and punched tape that could be fed to the Linotypes.
You may know that 6 bits can only represent 64 possibilities (2 to the 6th power). That's not enough characters. Shift, Unshift, Upper Rail and Lower Rail were used to enable majuscule (capital) and minuscule (little bitty) letters, and font changes such as bold or italic.
Accents? Diacritics? Nope. Not in the codeset. Not in the font magazine either. A Linotype could cast them, if properly equipped for the task, but they weren't in the least-common-denominator world where newspaper production lived.
So stylebooks of wire services and major newspapers simply said: don't use them.
/2