12 May
2005
12 May
'05
8:43 p.m.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Mona Lisa prints. The I/O room
at MSU's Computer Center had a large image generated by scanning a
photo of the painting. A scheme was worked out of which characters
(multiples in some cases) were drawn in any given cell to add up
to the appropriate darkness. I believe it was actually output to a
plotter which took a substantial amount of time to complete the job.
I would have guessed most large centers would have had such things.
On a more personal note, in the 1985-86 time frame I was working for
a software outfit that did real estate systems. The R&D wizard there
built hardware which went into standard serial terminals (Esprit
6310's; can't recall if there was ever a version in the TeleVideo
925's) to display 4 bit images of homes. The card worked by going
into the video chain of the terminal to overlay images, and into the
serial chain to grab bits. It was not intelligent; simply a marble
machine which recognized a specific introductory escape sequence and
then clocked nibbles into its video ram. The images were taken with
Sony cameras which wrote them to 2" floppies. I think the storage
may have been analog video, actually. They were then digitized using
a video frame grabber board in a standard PC and uploaded to the host.
In addition to screen display, we did MLS books with the images
integrated, etc. The output was generally done on Printronix P-300
printers, which were dot-addressable. (For those who haven't
met one of these machines, they had a shuttle with 132 "pixel"
hammers. The shuttle would work from left to right stopping at 8
or so positions. The hammers would print the top row of dots in
the characters of the current line, then the paper would move up one
"raster" line and the shuttle would run right to left doing the next
row. Eventually one row of characters would be completely printed.
A P-300 could print about 300 lines per minute. The shuttle and the
many print hammers gave the printers a distinctive sound. In addition
to the all-points-addressable mode, you could build or buy custom
ROMs with special characters in them.)
A few of us went into the office one weekend evening shortly after the
"Live Aid" concert with a video tape of the show, and grabbed and
printed a fair number of images from the performances. The 4-bit
graphics made interesting work of lens stars from the stage lighting.
De