…and its successor, the computer-driven phototypesetting machine.
Because in the Olden Days, when typesetting was done by hand, the typesetter would need a physical piece of type for each occurrence of a specific letter in a particular composition.
If we were still at that level of technology, there would be a serious “I” shortage for print-media reporting of the speeches of a certain individual.
who is this individual? ;-)
I can’t imagine anyone painstakingly seeing each letter to a newspaper – maybe that is why they were so short…
Mr. Obama seems like a pleasant enough individual, but his theology is unsound. He believes there is a fourth Person in the Godhead.
Individual letters are monotype, strings of words are linotype (lines of type).
The Linotype recirculates the type matrices and returns them to the magazine for re-use after each line is case; I believe the same is true of the Monotype on a letter-by-letter basis. So neither is vulnerable to running out of “I”s in transcripts of Obama’s speeches in the same way that hand typesetting would be, where there would have to be sufficient repeats of the letter for each occurrence on at least the page being composed….