8 Oct
8 Oct
10:59 p.m.
On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 06:51:55PM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
Thanks, Al. That's just the sort of thing I was looking for.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 9-Oct-2008 at 02:50 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -66.8 F (-54.9 C) Windchill -106.7 F (-77.1 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 14.5 kts Grid 33 Barometer 668.0 mb (11084 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
9 Oct
9 Oct
9:34 a.m.
New subject: Anyone know of a 1970s-style dot matrix "computer photo" generator/converter?
At 09:59 PM 10/8/2008, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 06:51:55PM -0700, Al Kossow
wrote:
Thanks, Al. That's just the sort of thing I was looking for.
I don't think that does overstrike, does it?
Illustrator will handle overstrike as well as let you choose a suitable
font. You could print from there, or if you really wanted a bitmap,
then PhotoShop will rasterize Illustrator at whatever resolution for printing.
A long time ago, I wrote a simple filter to take old overstrike ASCII
art and convert to .AI format: http://www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/
For that matter, certainly some of the old 70s picture booths used
dot-matrix as dots and not fonts, and not teletype or Diablo, so they
generally had easy-to-compute fixed dithering to make gray.
- John
11:31 p.m.
On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 08:34:31AM -0500, John Foust wrote:
At 09:59 PM 10/8/2008, Ethan Dicks wrote:
No, but for what I was trying to do, it does the job nicely. I'm
more going for the general effect than 100% authenticity to 1970s
methods. I now have a nice ASCIIfied version of myself, which
was the point of it all.
I only ever had one overstrike ASCII art file back in the day,
anyway - the really detailed picture of a cat. I have that
file somewhere on an OS/8 floppy, and probably on an RL01 pack,
but I'm pretty sure that particular file is not "lost". It
was one of the more interesting things I ever printed out on my
LA-180. I think everything else I had was simple (or not so
simple) one-glyph-per-cell ASCII art.
On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 06:51:55PM -0700, Al
Kossow wrote:
Thanks, Al. That's just the sort of thing I was looking for.
I don't think that does overstrike, does it? Illustrator will handle overstrike as well as let you
choose a suitable
font. You could print from there, or if you really wanted a bitmap,
then PhotoShop will rasterize Illustrator at whatever resolution for printing.
I don't have those applications at hand, so unfortunately, that path
won't work so well for me.
A long time ago, I wrote a simple filter to take old
overstrike ASCII
art and convert to .AI format: http://www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/
I'll have to check it out when the satellite comes up next.
For that matter, certainly some of the old 70s picture
booths used
dot-matrix as dots and not fonts, and not teletype or Diablo, so they
generally had easy-to-compute fixed dithering to make gray.
Thinking of that OSI rig owned by that family friend, ISTR it was dithered
dot-matrix, but the visual effect was similar to machine-crafted
ASCIIfication - up close - chaotic jumble, far away - a smooth looking
greyscale.
Thanks,
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 10-Oct-2008 at 03:20 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -67.9 F (-55.5 C) Windchill -109.4 F (-78.6 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 15.7 kts Grid 16 Barometer 673.2 mb (10886 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
8 Oct
8 Oct
11:01 p.m.
New subject: Mona Lisa
Does anyone here have the source code for the program (FORTRAN?) which
produced the large Mona Lisa printout on the 1403? The one I remember had
3 or 4 printouts taped together. Have any of the card decks survived?
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/
11:08 p.m.
New subject: Mona Lisa
I remember reading it, and "Snoopy"
A deck of FORMAT statements, with carriage control for mona lisa for the ovetyping
(CR with no LF)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 23:01:03 -0400
From: mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Mona Lisa
Does anyone here have the source code for the program (FORTRAN?) which
produced the large Mona Lisa printout on the 1403? The one I remember had
3 or 4 printouts taped together. Have any of the card decks survived?
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/
_________________________________________________________________
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11:28 p.m.
New subject: Mona Lisa
On 8 Oct 2008 at 22:08, Randy Dawson wrote:
I remember reading it, and "Snoopy"
A deck of FORMAT statements, with carriage control for mona lisa for the ovetyping
(CR with no LF)
I seem to remember that FORTRAN on many systems used the first
character of a PRINT/WRITE statement as "carriage control". A "1"
caused a page eject (actually a skip on channel 1 in the carriage
control tape.) Similarly, other numbers caused skips to other
channels--woe betide you if you forgot to put a perforation in each
of the 12 channels--a skip in an unperfed channel would enpty a box
of paper really quickly. A blank was the usual character for single-
spaced output. You could also punch a tape so that a skip was
executed over the perforation, but single-spaced output otherwise.
"+" kept the paper from advancing, I believe. This is all from
memory--I'd have to check to be sure.
Cheers,
Chuck
9 Oct
9 Oct
12:03 a.m.
New subject: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa)
On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 08:28:40PM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I seem to remember that FORTRAN on many systems used
the first
character of a PRINT/WRITE statement as "carriage control". A "1"
caused a page eject (actually a skip on channel 1 in the carriage
control tape.) Similarly, other numbers caused skips to other
channels--
Yep. You could get very fancy with pre-printed form letters,
but I only ever saw that done in textbook examples, not on a real
printer. By the time I was playing around with such things,
it was easier to just generate the entire letter on the
computer rather than have the computer "fill in the blanks".
I suspect in the days of the 1401 and friends, they didn't
want to try to merge pre-formatted text with calculated
values, addresses, etc., but once disk-based systems were
common, mingling text and data was trivial.
woe betide you if you forgot to put a perforation in
each
of the 12 channels--a skip in an unperfed channel would enpty a box
of paper really quickly.
And 'channel 0' was always "unperfed" - it wasn't documented,
but it _was_ a legal request (and you'll never see a hole in
channel 0 since there's no wire for it).
I heard tales of students who kept a "skip to channel 0" job handy
(in the days of electronic, not punchcard job submission, so early
1980s, IIRC)... when they spotted an item (stack of cards, paper,
disk pack!) sitting on top of one of the large printers, they'd
submit the job to run the paper out intentionally, and, here's
where the prank comes in, certain models of large printer would
automatically open when the paper was out, spilling whatever was
on top onto the floor.
We had to emulate skip channels in COMBOARDs, since folks were
submitting the same types of jobs they did with real printers
via our HASP/3780 link, and expecting equivalent results to
come back to their VAX. One of the (many) bugs I fixed was
that if you submitted a job with a "skip to channel 0", our
product's master control process would appear to hang. What
was really happening was that the process was writing an infinite
amount of blank lines to disk, i.e., "emptying" the box of
"paper". No customer ever waited around long enough to fill
their disk, so they'd kill the process and call us with a
bug report. The call that solved it for us was that a student
at some University kept submitting his job (since it never
ran to completion) often enough that the sysops caught him
at it and were able to examine the student's code to see
what he was doing. Everyone, but the student of course,
"knew" that you "can't" skip to channel 0 since it doesn't
exist, but with no error message to tell you you "can't"
do it, you'd never know (until perhaps after a real box of
paper was spooled into the output tray).
The bugfix was rather easy - we treated a "skip to channel 0"
as a "skip to channel 1", which was by convention, a form-feed
(though with our product as with a real printer, it was possible
to assign that to another line on the page).
I presume after a certain point in time, real printers did much
the same thing.
A blank was the usual character for single-
spaced output. You could also punch a tape so that a skip was
executed over the perforation, but single-spaced output otherwise.
Not sure about that - I've never punched a real forms control
tape.
"+" kept the paper from advancing, I
believe. This is all from
memory--I'd have to check to be sure.
That sounds familiar from the one FORTRAN class I took.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 9-Oct-2008 at 03:40 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -71.5 F (-57.5 C) Windchill -97.5 F (-72.0 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 5.4 kts Grid 49 Barometer 668.4 mb (11069 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
12:24 a.m.
New subject: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa)
> A blank was the usual character for single-
spaced output. You could
> also punch a tape so that a skip was executed over the perforation,
> but single-spaced output otherwise.
Not sure about that - I've never punched a real
forms control tape.
> "+" kept the paper from advancing, I believe. This is all from
> memory--I'd have to check to be sure.
On the IBM, CDC and Prime systems I worked with, blank to single space,
0 to double space, + to overstrike, - to triple space. (Prime even had
a variant they called "COBOL carriage control" in which the spooler
inspected the leading _two_ columns for such characters.)
MSU's SCOPE/HUSTLER installation assigned some channel, I don't recall
which, to land just above the end of the page. They then used this to
set up the lines of *** that were characteristic of banner pages, so
that they spanned across the perf, making it easier for Ops to burst the
listings. For some reason, the ** characters on their print chains were
always mushy. :)
Actually, they also sometimes printed dayfile output at the right side
of the page, allegedly to even the wear on the "chain", though I suppose
that would indicate that the printers weren't really "chain" printers.
De
12:59 a.m.
New subject: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa)
On 9 Oct 2008 at 0:24, Dennis Boone wrote:
MSU's SCOPE/HUSTLER installation assigned some
channel, I don't recall
which, to land just above the end of the page. They then used this to
set up the lines of *** that were characteristic of banner pages, so
that they spanned across the perf, making it easier for Ops to burst the
listings. For some reason, the ** characters on their print chains were
always mushy. :)
Standard for SCOPE (at least at CDC) was usually "M" or "=" (may have
been channel 9 on the tape, but I'm not certain), but I'm sure it
could be changed by the installation. Better to use an alpha
character, though--there were more of them on the print train than
the special characters. On the CDC in-house systems, it was the "0"
that got fuzzy fastest, but then we were always printing dumps. You
got so you could hear the distinctive pattern of the burst pages
almost subconsciously--the job ahead of you could be printing a box-
length job and you could be on the other side of the room talking to
someone and still know that a new output job had started--even with
the printer cover closed. The 512 train printer sounded like a
screaming mimi; the 501 drum printers sounded like a muffled machine
gun.
Computer rooms could be very noisy places.
Some funny words just came into my head in connection with printers:
SPIM, SKIP, SKAP, SPAP. Can't remember the system or language they
were associated with--although I'm certain it wasn't CDC.
Cheers,
Chuck
1:12 a.m.
New subject: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa)
Some funny words just came into my head in connection
with printers:
SPIM, SKIP, SKAP, SPAP. Can't remember the system or language they
were associated with--although I'm certain it wasn't CDC.
Sure sound like they'd fit in with things like WEOX. You sure they
weren't COMPASS- or FTN5-related?
De
1:28 a.m.
New subject: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa)
On 9 Oct 2008 at 1:12, Dennis Boone wrote:
> Some funny words just came into my head in
connection with printers:
> SPIM, SKIP, SKAP, SPAP. Can't remember the system or language they
> were associated with--although I'm certain it wasn't CDC.
No, I don't think so. Probably IBM--maybe 1620 SPS II printer
mnemonics?
Cheers,
Chuck
9:55 a.m.
New subject: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa)
I heard tales of students who kept a "skip to
channel 0" job handy
(in the days of electronic, not punchcard job submission, so early
1980s, IIRC)... when they spotted an item (stack of cards, paper,
disk pack!) sitting on top of one of the large printers, they'd
submit the job to run the paper out intentionally, and, here's
where the prank comes in, certain models of large printer would
automatically open when the paper was out, spilling whatever was
on top onto the floor.
In my undergraduate days, I remember the time somebody (not me, I hasten
to add) put a plastic cup of coffee on top of such a line printer. And by
chance (there was no 'prank job' involved AFAIK) the printer ran out of
paper. The result is obvious, shall we just say the printer, the user
concerned, at least 2 innocent bystanders and a lot of printout got soaked...
-tony
5:05 a.m.
New subject: Mona Lisa
On Wed, 8 Oct 2008, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 8 Oct 2008 at 22:08, Randy Dawson wrote:
We've put two Fortran demo programs for the IBM 1130 on our FTP server:
ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/ibm1130/cards/FORTRAN/
One prints out a James Bond (JBOND), the other a Snoopy (SNOPY).
Christian
I remember reading it, and "Snoopy"
A deck of FORMAT statements, with carriage control for mona lisa for the ovetyping
(CR with no LF)
I seem to remember that FORTRAN on many systems used the first
character of a PRINT/WRITE statement as "carriage control". A "1"
caused a page eject (actually a skip on channel 1 in the carriage
control tape.) Similarly, other numbers caused skips to other
channels--woe betide you if you forgot to put a perforation in each
of the 12 channels--a skip in an unperfed channel would enpty a box
of paper really quickly. A blank was the usual character for single-
spaced output. You could also punch a tape so that a skip was
executed over the perforation, but single-spaced output otherwise.
5765
days inactive
5766
days old
13 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
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aek＠bitsavers.org -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
cc＠informatik.uni-stuttgart.de -
cclist＠sydex.com -
drb＠msu.edu -
ethan.dicks＠usap.gov -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
mloewen＠cpumagic.scol.pa.us -
rdawson16＠hotmail.com