- According to this story, TAOCP Volume 1 was typeset using hot-metal printing, Volume 2 was typeset using "photo-offset printing to save money for the publisher" (which Knuth didn't like), and Volume 3 was typeset using TeX. But in reality, the first editions of all three volumes of TAOCP (Vol 1 1968, Vol 2 1969, Vol 3 1973), and the second edition of Volume 1 (1973), were all typeset using hot-metal printing. It was the galley proofs of the second edition of Volume 2 (in preparation around 1977) which used photo-typesetting, but this was never published. Ultimately the second edition of Volume 2 when published in 1981 used digital typesetting (TeX + Metafont).
- He claims that in "volume 3" (let's charitably assume he meant the 1981 second edition of Volume 2, as this is the only thing that makes sense: the next editions of these volumes were from 1997–98, after "Accidental Empires" was published), he "saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer" and "Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful" — but this makes no sense, as these published books were (obviously!) not printed using a low-resolution laser printer, but were printed using a good digital typesetter at 5000+ dpi.
For more history, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/367058/wheres-an-exa...
So either the story is completely made up, or (accounting for lapses in memory etc), Cringely may have meant one of the following:
1. The fonts used in 1981 (Vol 2 2nd edition) were not the final version and were further refined (see Knuth's "burned with disappointment" linked above), leading to the current Computer Modern (BTW: try not to use the thin/spindly on-screen versions: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722) after further consultation with leading type designers,
2. Cringely may have been talking about something like the 1979 book "TeX and METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting", which is basically a very early application of the prototype TeX78 that was still being developed at the time, and was indeed (I think) typeset on the Xerox Graphic Printer (XGP), and you can indeed easily see the low-resolution artefacts. (They're impossible to miss: if such a conversation as above indeed happened, and about this book or something from that early period, likely what Knuth said was something like "yes of course the type looks bad in this book, but it's been designed for a real (higher-resolution) digital typesetter and it will look fine there", not that he couldn't see it.)
"""
It was a major advance, and in the introduction he proudly claimed that the printing once again looked just as good as the hot type of volume 1.
Except it didn’t.
Reading his introduction to volume 3,1 had the feeling that Knuth was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. Squinting closely at the type in volume 3, I saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer—not the beautiful, smooth curves of real type or even of a photo typesetter. There were “jaggies”— little bumps that make all the difference between good type and bad. Yet here was Knuth, writing the same letters that I was reading, and claiming that they were beautiful.
“Donnie,” I wanted to say. “What are you talking about? Can’t you see the jaggies?”
But he couldn’t. Donald Knuth’s gray matter, far more powerful than mine, was making him look beyond the actual letters and words to the mathematical concepts that underlay them. Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful, so that’s what Knuth saw and I didn’t. This effect of mind over what matters is both a strength and a weakness for those, like Knuth, who would break radical new ground with computers.
Unfortunately for printers, most of the rest of the world sees like me. The tyranny of the normal distribution is that we run the world as though it was populated entirely by Bob Cringelys, completely ignoring the Don Knuths among us.
"""
From Accidental Empires. Which you can get as a book, but he uploaded a scan to his blog here: https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-...