A wire room ran on sound and colour. Machines hammered copy onto fan-fold rolls all day, and an editor crossing the room could tell which service was talking by the paper feeding out of it — AP on canary yellow, UPI on white. Bells marked priority before anyone read a word.

Everything here comes from that constraint. Baudot code carries five bits and no lowercase, so copy sets in capitals at one fixed pitch, ragged right, hard-broken at seventy-odd characters. Type strikes unevenly through a fabric ribbon. Corners are square because paper has no corners to round.