Though sel­dom heard these days, the term “desk­top pub­lish­ing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the per­son­al com­put­er. It meant that one could cre­ate a pub­li­ca­tion with­out own­ing a press or con­tract­ing with an out­fit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writ­ing, design, and print­ing could take place on one’s desk, pro­vid­ed one had fur­nished it with the right com­put­er and acces­sories. From the mid-eight­ies through the ear­ly nineties, that meant an Apple Mac­in­tosh equipped with a Laser­Writer print­er and a copy of Aldus Page­Mak­er. For the first time, ordi­nary com­put­er users could cre­ate newslet­ters, brochures, and oth­er doc­u­ments assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a fea­ture abbre­vi­at­ed as WYSIWYG.

That’s not the only strange-look­ing piece of text encoun­tered by ear­ly desk­top pub­lish­ers. Since Page­Mak­er enabled users to cre­ate a lay­out before even hav­ing the words to fill it, it need­ed dum­my text to occu­py the emp­ty spaces in order to pro­vide a rea­son­able approx­i­ma­tion of how the print­ed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua,” that dum­my text begins, and it con­tin­ues as long as its defined field allows, repeat­ing itself as nec­es­sary. It may resem­ble Latin, but any­one with a decent under­stand­ing of that lan­guage won’t have to read much before notic­ing how odd­ly man­gled it is. So where did this mys­te­ri­ous text, still famil­iar to all lay­out edi­tors and graph­ic design­ers, actu­al­ly come from?

Pur­su­ing an answer to that ques­tion in her new video above, Rab­bit Hole cre­ator Emi­ly Zhang talks to indi­vid­u­als with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence includ­ing Lau­ra Per­ry, the for­mer cre­ative direc­tor at Aldus (a com­pa­ny named, inci­den­tal­ly, for the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Venet­ian print­er Aldus Manu­tius). It was she who first made Lorem ipsum dig­i­tal, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly used it as a whol­ly ana­log graph­ic design­er in the form of rub-off Letraset sheets. She man­u­al­ly entered it straight into Page­Mak­er off one such sheet, mak­ing occa­sion­al typos along the way. That was just anoth­er phase of trans­for­ma­tion Lorem ipsum had been under­go­ing since Cicero’s words were first bor­rowed — and chopped up, and mixed with frag­ments of oth­er lan­guages — to cre­ate what became the indus­try-stan­dard dum­my text.

In the process of fill­ing the gaps in this sto­ry, Zhang also talks to Richard McClin­tock, a pro­fes­sor of Latin long acknowl­edged as the pre­mier expert on Lorem ipsum. Ulti­mate­ly, she unearths a few truths that are new even to him, includ­ing an impor­tant one about the 1966 meet­ing at Letraset in which the idea was first float­ed of a sin­gle piece of dum­my text that could sub­sti­tute for most West­ern lan­guages. It was James Mosley, the high­ly knowl­edge­able head librar­i­an at the St. Bride Print­ing Library, who deliv­ered Letraset the Cicero quo­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly known as Forum ipsum, “which had become gar­bled by more than one type­set­ter sit­ting at his bench since the mid-fif­teen-hun­dreds.” Like­ly to remain in use as long as human­i­ty puts words on pages — paper, dig­i­tal, or what­ev­er comes next — Lorem ipsum sure­ly has a few more forms to take.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became Used by Type­set­ters Every­where

Explore a New Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of Print­ing Types, the Author­i­ta­tive His­to­ry of Print­ing & Typog­ra­phy from 1922

How Mag­a­zine Pages Were Cre­at­ed Before Com­put­ers: A Vet­er­an of the Lon­don Review of Books Demon­strates the Metic­u­lous, Man­u­al Process

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Amer­i­cans of a cer­tain age may well remem­ber grow­ing up with an Apple II in the class­room, and the per­pet­u­al temp­ta­tion it held out to play The Ore­gon Trail, Num­ber Munch­ers, or per­haps Lode Run­ner. More than a few recess gamers went on to com­put­er-ori­ent­ed careers, but only the most curi­ous sought an answer to the ques­tion implied in the machine’s name: was there an Apple I? Half a cen­tu­ry after the foun­da­tion of Apple, Inc., then known as Apple Com­put­er, the prod­uct that launched what’s now one of the world’s most valu­able com­pa­nies remains very much an obscu­ri­ty. Unless you fre­quent com­put­er muse­ums, you’re unlike­ly ever to have laid eyes on an Apple I, let alone used one. Even if one of the exist­ing mod­els were to come on the mar­ket, you’d need about half a mil­lion dol­lars to buy it.

It’s actu­al­ly eas­i­er to buy the parts that went into an Apple I and build it your­self — which, as demon­strat­ed by the 8‑Bit Guy in the video above, still isn’t easy at all. Yet it does con­vey some­thing of what Apple’s very first cus­tomers would have expe­ri­enced in 1976, when do-it-your­self was the order of the day in com­put­ing.

When I bought the Mac­Book on which I’m writ­ing this post, I sim­ply opened it up and, nat­u­ral­ly, found it ready to use. That would scarce­ly have been imag­in­able to com­put­er enthu­si­asts of the mid-sev­en­ties, accus­tomed as they were to sol­der­ing indi­vid­u­al­ly pur­chased chips onto elec­tron­ics boards by hand. The Apple I marked a great leap for­ward in con­ve­nience by com­ing already assem­bled, albeit with­out a mon­i­tor, a key­board, or even a case; the pur­chase price of USD $666.66 (clos­er to $4,000 today) just got you the board. But what a board.

Though we remem­ber Steve Jobs as the mas­ter­mind, the Apple I is a tour de force of the engi­neer­ing genius of his busi­ness part­ner Steve Woz­ni­ak. When the Steves debuted it at the Home­brew Com­put­er Club in July of 1976, the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of chips and advanced func­tions (BASIC pro­gram­ming! Cas­sette-tape data stor­age! Actu­al video out­put, if only of tele­type-like scrolling text!) cre­at­ed a con­sid­er­able demand then and there. We often hear of Jobs and Woz­ni­ak start­ing Apple in a garage, and it was in that garage (as well as the house­’s liv­ing room) that the first Apple I boards were put togeth­er. Ulti­mate­ly, 200 were sold before the Apple II arrived the fol­low­ing year. Apple’s first com­put­er may look intim­i­dat­ing to most of today’s Mac users. But con­sid­er the com­pa­ny’s rep­u­ta­tion for min­i­mal­ism, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and a knack for cap­tur­ing the con­sumer’s imag­i­na­tion: all qual­i­ties present on that board 50 years ago.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott on the Mak­ing of Apple’s Icon­ic “1984” Com­mer­cial, Aired on Super Bowl Sun­day in 1984

Before The Simp­sons, Matt Groen­ing Illus­trat­ed a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Com­put­ers (1989)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Edgy 1990s Com­mer­cial for Apple’s Mac­in­tosh Com­put­er: A Med­i­ta­tion on Pow­er

Dis­cov­ered: The User Man­u­al for the Old­est Sur­viv­ing Com­put­er in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

If mono­rails have a bad name, The Simp­sons may be to blame. In an episode acclaimed for its hilar­i­ous­ness since it first aired 33 years ago, a huck­ster shows up in Spring­field and con­vinces the town to build just such a tran­sit sys­tem, which turns out to be not just sus­pi­cious­ly unnec­es­sary (at least in young Lisa’s judg­ment) but also dan­ger­ous­ly shod­dy. I watched it while grow­ing up in the sub­urbs of Seat­tle, a city that endured bit­ter­ly pro­tract­ed con­tention over whether or not to build out its own rudi­men­ta­ry mono­rail sys­tem — a World’s Fair arti­fact, like the Space Nee­dle — but final­ly opt­ed not to. Con­cerns were per­pet­u­al­ly raised, right­ly or wrong­ly, about the noise and dark­ness that could result from extend­ing the wide ele­vat­ed track on which it ran.

But what if there were anoth­er way to build a mono­rail? Indeed, what if it could run on the ground, like a tra­di­tion­al two-railed train? Such was the idea in the head of the inde­fati­ga­ble Irish-Aus­tralian engi­neer Louis Bren­nan, who’s remem­bered today for invent­ing a wire-guid­ed tor­pe­do back in 1877.

If things had gone dif­fer­ent­ly, maybe he’d be bet­ter remem­bered for invent­ing the gyro mono­rail, the sub­ject of the Pri­mal Space video above. In Bren­nan’s design, which he actu­al­ly got built and work­ing, the car bal­ances on a sin­gle rail with the aid of a pair of spin­ning pow­ered gyro­scopes that pre­vent it from falling over (and, in the case of pow­er loss, could keep spin­ning for half an hour to allow a safe evac­u­a­tion), allow­ing it to run faster and cor­ner more tight­ly than the trains the world knew.

Bren­nan’s gyro mono­rail made its pub­lic debut at the Japan-British Exhi­bi­tion in Lon­don in 1910, giv­ing 50 pas­sen­gers at a time the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ride around in a cir­cle at 20 miles per hour. Though the inter­est it drew inspired a minor boom of gyro-sta­bi­lized chil­dren’s toys, it nev­er actu­al­ly trans­lat­ed into a real tran­sit sys­tem. Around the same time, a group in Ger­many also unveiled their own ver­sion, and in the decades there­after, addi­tion­al abortive efforts were made in Rus­sia. The engi­neer­ing involved was impres­sive, as the video explains, but also a bit too com­pli­cat­ed and expen­sive for its time. The devel­op­ment of a new Ger­man app-ordered autonomous gyro mono­rail sys­tem was announced just a few years ago. Giv­en the pos­si­bil­i­ty of its enter­ing pro­duc­tion as soon as 2032, we could soon be hear­ing cho­rus­es of “Mono­rail, mono­rail, mono­rail” — or rather, “Mono­cab, Mono­cab, Mono­cab” — once again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Trips on the World’s Old­est Elec­tric Sus­pen­sion Rail­way in 1902 & 2015 Show How a City Changes Over a Cen­tu­ry

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Why Pub­lic Tran­sit Sucks in the Unit­ed States: Four Videos Tell the Sto­ry

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.