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Sep 20, 2026 26 min

The Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile

from Computerphile Hosted by Computerphile

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdModNEK_1UMainframes and the Unix Revolution: http://youtu.be/-rPPqm44xLsTo find out how the 1980 Bell Labs `vacation memo' was completely rebuilt,in 2013, visit:http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdfIf 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/202The memorandum gives an outline of how the `reverse engineering' of the 202 was accomplished.http://www.facebook.com/computerphilehttps://twitter.com/computer_phileThis video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: http://bit.ly/nottscomputerComputerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at: http://bit.ly/bradychannels

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The Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile

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