The contrast between the Linotron 303 described in this page, and the 202 described in the Bell Labs memo is interesting. The 303 was introduced in 1974 and uses film-based fonts, whereas the 202, introduced in 1978, uses fonts that are stored digitally as vectors. I naively assumed that a "303" would be a newer, more advanced machine than a "202", but that's not the case.
I wrote parts of the the hyphenation package used in the H&J version of the L202, there where 3 versions , 202 H&j, just send it Cora 5 marked up text and it would justify, hyphenate and set it. The L 202 slave, which you had to send it xy positions for each line and wordspacing etc. And the VIP emulator slave which emulated the older VIP photosetter. There was also a very rare ELA (exotic language adaptation) version with a large 80gb CDC disk pack on the side which could do Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Korean. Finally there was the graphics version, which could set embedded pictures but it had to have precision photosetter tube with a clean bond on the faceplate otherwise you got banding.
Used to be a lot of math involved to figure out how deep copy would run before sending on a motorbike to be typeset. When it returned on another motorbike there would be anxious moments unrolling the typesetting before paste up in case you'd made an expensive mistake. Hard to imagine now how much DTP changed everything
My Dad left school at 15 to support his family (his dad was Blind) back in the 30s - he got a job as a lino-type operator on one of the wholly mechanical devices - if you ever get a chance to see how one works take a look - especially the type-sorter and the justification hardware
There's a good "revisiting" of that paper, too: http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf
Edit:
The contrast between the Linotron 303 described in this page, and the 202 described in the Bell Labs memo is interesting. The 303 was introduced in 1974 and uses film-based fonts, whereas the 202, introduced in 1978, uses fonts that are stored digitally as vectors. I naively assumed that a "303" would be a newer, more advanced machine than a "202", but that's not the case.