Donald Knuth
Recent articles about Donald Knuth
From punch cutters to number crunchers
Issue 94, Summer 2017
In the summer of 1983, a Stanford seminar became a milestone in the long transition from craft to code
The digital wave
Issue 7, Summer 1992
The old manufacturing companies that dominated typeface production through most of this century have been swallowed and largely pushed to the sidelines, while initiatives in design – and in the terms and routines that condition design – have been made by a few rapidly growing software and computer hardware companies. Pathbreaking contributions have come from small studios or individual designers working, in every sense, from just a desktop. There have been ‘font wars’, corporate piracy and copyright contravention on a large scale. To use the loose terminology by which we attempt to carve up typographic history, it is clear that during the 1980s, the developed world left behind photographic typography (to which metal had ceded) and entered the era of the ‘digital’