Title riffing off an older thread “Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDLU”.
Eric Swenson debugged SHRDLU source code and made it run.
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I like the font of the text display and its “feel”. — Is this the DP 3300 or is this coming from a graphics processor?
Yes, it’s a terminal emulator for the Datapoint 3300. The font is verified against a real ROM image.
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BTW, just for reference, “etaoin shrdlu” is the first and second column from the left on a 90-channel standard keyboard used for traditional hot metal typesetting. Since there’s no backspace key on a Linotype-like typesetting machine, this is what an operator would somewhat canonically type to fill a line after an error, in order to discard the mistyped line from the matrix assembler. (So, kind of a lorem ipsum of the engineering age.)
Compare this image:
(Image source: Matrix Teeth to Magazine Channel to Character)
No idea, if SHRDLU is related to shrdlu in any way.
Wikipedia claims, “the name SHRDLU was derived from ETAOIN SHRDLU, the arrangement of the letter keys on a Linotype machine”.
I’m guessing it’s a placeholder in lieu of a proper name. Exactly the same thing happened with the game Zork, which was a nonsense word that was never replaced with a real name.
Sometimes, such a mistyped line (or slug, when cast) would make it into print, despite this tell-tale error signature, a veritable double screw-up – and finding such a line in a newspaper was probably a fun experience.
But isn’t this common cause rather than cause and effect? The linotype keyboard follows something close to the letter frequencies of English. Likewise, the MIT culture would have included information theory, decryption, and letter frequencies. That these words are (barely) pronounceable makes them a sign of belonging.
Hard to know. Likewise, knowing what the enigmatic sequence “etaoin shrdlu” means, why it is there, why it is even funny, if encountered in the wild (as there have to go quite of a number of things wrong, in order for it to show up), and how this relates to one of the most amazing feats of mechanical engineering is probably a worthy piece of nerd culture, as well.
It’s true, the modernisation of typesetting is a wonderful journey - and as it takes us to phototypesetting, we meet some old friends. (As noted in the head post, which points us to the earlier thread Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDLU (1980)
I was just idly wondering how far back this ETAOIN sequence goes, and it’s quite a way:
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There must be much earlier sources: the somewhat simpler 72-channel keyboard of the Linotype Model 1 “Simplex”, which features the same layout for letters, goes back to 1890, as do the related channel keys of the type matrices. (I guess, frequency analysis became somewhat important in the US Civil War?)
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well well, indeed it is so early!
When a Linotype operator made an error, he ran his fingers down two rows of keys to signify in hot metal that the line of type needed to be extracted from the body matter by the compositor during the page make-up process.
But sometimes - just occasionally - the proof-readers and the compositors missed it.
And it finished up in print, in the newspaper, confusing the poor paying reader no end.
Etaoin shrdlu marked a bad slug, and an even worse oversight when published.
(Easter egg at the link: Einstein operating a Linotype)
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