John Fleischman

On a Wednesday afternoon last August. the beast of technology came slouching down Highway 68 through the heart of Yellow Springs, a small college town in southwest Ohio, and carried away a bit of what made Yellow Springs a little different from other places. There was no blood spilled, only ink. The Yellow Springs News went offset. A generation of machines retired from the business of printing the weekly newspaper. The immediate victim was the News’ venerable Miehle, flatbed cylinder press, manufactured around 1906 which the News bought in 1960. The Miehle is not worn out-far from it. Because machines were made to higher standards of longevity in 1906 than they are today and because the people at the Yellow Springs News have lavished oil and grease on its every moving part, the big Miehle is in fine shape. Ken Champney, who is the publisher, one-third owner, chief printer and managing editor of the News, has nursed it all this time and says the Miehle is good for another 70 years of service. The Miehle

Present Indications and Past Intimations In the small hours of Wednesday, April 20th, a supervisor walked into the Computer Operations room of the Los Angeles Times, carrying a cup of coffee. The supervisor was a very tall man — six foot six and, in the way that the tall have of putting things out of the reach of harm and the short, he parked his cup atop one of the computer banks of the main IBM 370/158, and went about his business. Enter a short man bearing cardboard boxes and looking for a safe place to store them. Unable to see the lurking coffee cup, the box-carrier chose the very same computer bank as a suitably inaccessible place for his burden. On tiptoes, he pushed the boxes up. The cup fell in such a way that most of its contents went right to the very heart of the machine. The entire 370/158 system went down. A repairman was turned out of bed. Over the phone. he asked his first sleepy question. “Did the coffee have

Indications and Intimations All photographs courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.   The editor who has teenage children but who doesn’t like to think of himself as a relic of a bygone era had noticed the work going on in the Composing Room. He had even heard of the plans for a hot lead exhibit. But when he actually looked through the glass partition to see a linotype machine set up with all its associated paraphernalia under a sign proclaiming, “Los Angeles Times, A Corner of the Composing Room, 1881-1974,” a feeling of horror came over him. Here, under glass, in a museum, was the workday world he had inhabited nearly all his adult life. Three years ago, linotypes were as common as pencils right where he was standing and now they had one under glass. He moved on, contemplating a dark paranoid theory that this was some enigmatic corporate message, that perhaps next week he might come back to see a stuffed reporter set up next to the linotype. It was a feeling not