24 Sep
2002
24 Sep
'02
1:48 p.m.
While looking through the pile of stuff I got with the PDP-8/E, I found a
tray of papertapes from 'ECRM, INC'. The tapes are labeled as follows:
5365 Board (Video Store) Diag (c) 1976 ECRM, Inc
5000 Series Panel Switches Diag (c) 1975 ECRM, Inc
BTCON 5000 (c) 1974 ECRM,
Inc
Beehive Terminal Diagnostic (c) 1975 ECRM,
Inc
ECRM Keyboard Diagnostic (c) 1976 ECRM, Inc
Dictionary Generator Program SW9122(G) (c) 1974 ECRM,Inc
AutoPrep 1 PaceSetter (c) 1974 ECRM,
Inc
Dictionary Generator Program SW9122(F) (c) 1974 ECRM, Inc.
5342 Board (Stok Search) Diag. (c) 1976 ECRM, Inc
5018 Board (Interrupt Mask) Diag (c) 1976 ECRM, Inc
5005 Board Serial Punch Diag (c) 1976 ECRM,
Inc
The use of some of these is obvious from the label, others are not. I am
assuming that the PDP-8/E was connected to something made by ECRM, but I
have no idea what. I do have one ECRM board, which is the 5005 Serial
Punch/Reader controller.
Does anyone know who ECRM is/was, and what kind of machine/system these
tapes might have been used with?
24 Sep
24 Sep
3:11 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 09:49:09PM -0400, Christopher McNabb wrote:
While looking through the pile of stuff I got with the
PDP-8/E, I found a
tray of papertapes from 'ECRM, INC'. The tapes are labeled as follows:
Does anyone know who ECRM is/was, and what kind of
machine/system these
tapes might have been used with?
I don't know anything about ECRM but the titles together suggest add-on
typesetting or page layout hardware. "Dictionary" likely refers to
hyphenations rather than spelling correction.
The terminal would have been used for input, and maybe editing, of the text
and formatting commands. The computer would then break the text into lines,
add hyphens, and translate the result into the specialized codes used by the
Linotype, phototypesetter, etc. Generally the typesetting codes are pretty
low-level. The Linotype only worked with a line at a time so you had to
deal with vertical spacing and boxes for photos yourself. Phototypesetters
could do vertical spacing.
The video system might be for previewing the page -- that seems quite fancy
for a small computer but it obviously was used for something!
-- Derek
9:19 p.m.
Derek Peschel wrote:
On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 09:49:09PM -0400, Christopher
McNabb wrote:
>Does anyone know who ECRM is/was, and what kind of
machine/system these
>tapes might have been used with?
I don't know anything about ECRM but the titles
together suggest add-on
typesetting or page layout hardware. "Dictionary" likely refers to
hyphenations rather than spelling correction.
As Derek says, it appears that this was some typesetting system. A quick
look on Google for ECRM throws up a few pages relating to typesetting
systems. I did not dig much deeper but at first glance it would appear
that ECRM is still around and still in that business (see www.ecrm.com).
-- hbp
26 Sep
26 Sep
6:05 a.m.
On Wednesday 25 September 2002 4:11 am, you wrote:
On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 09:49:09PM -0400, Christopher
McNabb wrote:
> While looking through the pile of stuff I got with the PDP-8/E, I found a
> tray of papertapes from 'ECRM, INC'. The tapes are labeled as follows:
>
> Does anyone know who ECRM is/was, and what kind of machine/system these
> tapes might have been used with?
ECRM made a OCR machine that used an 8/E as its brain. This machine needed a
lot of extra hardware ( in the form of a few extra omnibus boards) to achieve
this. Output of the operation was a papertape to be fed into a typesetting
machine.
Some of the ECRM omnibus boards are quite usefull : they have a two board
display system, with 80x24 char output and an IO board combing fast PPT
punch, fast PPT reader and serial channel, all on one omnibus board.
If you need anything ispecial , I have full docs on the ECRM system.
Jos Dreesen
7905
days inactive
7907
days old
3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
cmcnabb＠4mcnabb.net -
dpeschel＠eskimo.com -
hansp＠aconit.org -
jos.mar＠bluewin.ch