16 Jul
2008
16 Jul
'08
6:41 p.m.
Diane Bruce wrote:
I'm sorry it came across that way. ;-)
8-)
This actually wasn't all that long ago. Certainly recent enough for
drum-scanners to be somewhat more common than they used to be.
Surprisingly, there are still companies out there running Bull
DPS9000-class mainframes. Not many, but one here and there. These
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 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.
Peace... Sridhar
>>>> Nah, a Rube Goldberg inspired solution would have included paper cups,
...
Both
ways. Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill both ways. etc. etc.
Except I wasn't
kidding. I had an IBM mainframe with only SNA capabilities,
and a Honeywell-Bull machine with no network interfaces at
all. I used the lineprinter on the Bull to print, drum-scanned it into
an IBM PS/2, then used a Microchannel 3270 emulation card as the main
console of the IBM mainframe to transfer the file to the mainframe.
Took a while, but worked just fine.
That's way cool. 'drum-scanned' ? The first OCR stuff I worked on developing
was a page scanner, not very practical for books. ;-) It was fun doing it
on a pair of PDP-11/23's though.