Not so about the Linotype. Back in 1980, I personally ran the Alphatype CRS phototypesetter (bought by DEK for the purpose), in the basement of Margaret Jacks Hall, that produced the entire camera-ready copy of The Art Of Computer Programming, Volume II, Second Edition. The DVI files and Computer Modern fonts were created by the early, Sail-language, 36-bit versions of TeX and Metafont that were later redesigned and implemented to be more cross-platform. Knuth rewrote the firmware that resided on the Alphatype (in 8080 assembly language), and I wrote the code that translated from DVI and drove it from the DEC20 mainframe over a serial line (trickier than it sounds; see our joint paper "Optimal prepaging and font caching" ACM TOPLAS Vol 7 Issue 1).

impressive. do you have written up that somewhere? I'm sure there are several people interested in the history of Metafont, TeX, etc.

I'm pretty sure there are TUGboat articles on this, but you may find:

https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html

a useful starting point.

This guy Fuchs.