[cctalk] Re: Try Algol 68 on Windows

OK, I just wanted to chime in on this retro stuff.  Back in 1996 or so I built a laser photoplotter for making circuit board artwork.  See http://pico-systems.com/photoplot.html for a pic and some info.  The original software was written in Turbo Pascal on a Win 95 system so it could access the DMA card from a user program.  The limited memory under Win95 left the program really cramped for large bitmaps.  So, I moved the program to a Win 2K system and split it in half.  the Win 2K program created a massive bitmap file which I then compressed with zip and shipped to the Win95 computer that then sent it out to the laser.  This worked quite well.  But, about 2014 I was worried that ancient Win 95 system would die, so I converted it to run from a Beagle Bone Black.  Due to the small shared memory between the PRU and the ARM processor, I needed to compress the data.  So, for each raster line, there was a string of 16-bit tokens.  The high bit indicated laser on/off, and the rest of the bits were a 15-bit repeat count.  A token of all zero indicates the end of that raster line.  2 consecutive zero tokens indicates the end of the entire plot. THEN, I hacked up the Win 2K Turbo Pascal for Windows program from 1996 to generate these compressed files and ran it through the Linux FPC (Free Pascal Compiler).  It was designed to handle Borland and DEC Pascal extensions, and does a really nice job of it. Pascal is really sort of a dialect of Algol, so I thought this was somewhat on topic. Jon