Mona Lisa

At 11:45 PM 10/10/2008, Megan Gentry wrote: I have a tape somewhere with a bunch of those as well. I really should try to read it and see if it's still OK. A related war story (software breaking hardware): way back when (late '70s) I was printing the moon image (something like 4 panels wide by six panels high) on what I think was a DEC LP05 - a drum printer. This printer had hammers that fired to hit the ribbon at the right time when a character on the drum was in the right position. The printer had 66 hammers on a shuttle that moved back and forth to print even then odd characters across the 132 column page. Normally, you feed it a line and it prints half the columns, then shuttles over and prints the next half. Linefeed, print half, then shuttle again. Well, these printer images were heavily overprinted with lots of blank spaces, so you spent a lot of time shuttling the heads back and forth while printing just a few characters. So, I got smart. Wrote a program to convert the input so that the printer was fed all of the even characters (with spaces for the odd ones), overprinting as necessary, then fed the odd characters. I did this to save all the time spent shifting the hammer bank back and forth. It would take less time to feed to the printer, and would print a lot more quickly. Well, I fired it up and sent the output to the printer, which printed VERY loudly for about a minute then blew the circuit breaker. Too much, too fast, I guess. :-) -Rick