17 Jul
2008
17 Jul
'08
2:19 a.m.
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 09:41:18PM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Diane Bruce wrote:
...
This actually wasn't all that long ago. Certainly
recent enough for
drum-scanners to be somewhat more common than they used to be.
Ah, just read up on it on wiki.
The ones we were using were rotary scanners, we had an early CCD array
a whopping 1024 pixels in one line as I recall (this was a while ago),
a rubber roller pulled the page through. There was some code to
try to 'straighten' the page in software and then the OCR code itself.
It was DMA'd into one PDP-11/23 then DMA'd across to the other PDP-11/23
for operator intervention.
Surprisingly, there are still companies out there
running Bull
DPS9000-class mainframes. Not many, but one here and there. These
I'm not at all surprised.
people had been doing their data transfers in and out
of their DPS8 box
by tape, but their last tape drive had just died, and so they decided to
rid themselves of the machine. However, they had some data they hadn't
backed up, and they wanted it in an IBM format.
I still have a few 9t reels sitting around, they have all turned into
goo I'm afraid. I wasn't that careful with storage.
I just drum-scanned into TIFF and used OCR software on
the PS/2 to do
the heavy lifting. I used the PS/2 because 3270/A cards are a dime a
dozen and I happen to have a rather large pile of PS/2 equipment lying
around.
cool.
Peace... Sridhar
- Diane
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