On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote: As for the early microcomputers, I still prefer the Compucolor I (model 8001 or 8051) over that any day of the year. It was made the same year in '75, but this was a 8080 based system. The model 8051 also came with a 19" screen. They even had hi-res color graphics. Quite impressive for it's day as a microcomputer. I still remember seeing this at the Computer Mart store in NYC. From what I hear, this is hard to find. =Dan

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Visiting the Computer Mart store was a weekly event :) I haven't seen many webpages with a bigger writeup on this other than the old-computer.com website. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=565 =Dan

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote: yep, it had 8 colors, but it was still impressive for it's day. They even made a CP/M version after that, also another model with an 8" floppy =Dan

I have a few rather thick text printouts from the mid-1970's on 132 column paper,standard fanfold stuff printed out from DEC teletypes and line printers I'm wondering what the best way to scan this in would be, to get actual text outputthat's readable and usable ? In most cases there is no way even the best OCR could tell the difference betweenan "L", "l", "1" or "I", and "O" or "0" is just as bad. Hand-typing over 6" thick printout is not my idea of fun. Any bright ideas? there's one in particular I want to scan in and get documented, as there's an old-wives tale about the code I want to verify if it's true (it's an original 1970's printout of Zork in Fortran that is supposedly "auto-correcting" after a fashion)not that I buy it... Dan.

But what of "COMMON" statements in Fortran? Is it COMMON "III" or "LLL" or "L1L" or "LIL" or "ILL" or...well you see what I mean... and stuff like if (A = O) was that the variable "O" or the number 0 ?yes I know that's not a proper fortran if... but you get the idea even typing by hand reading by eye can be really hard, as some others would attest. check the sourceforge project TREK7 for some ideas. PS - if ANYONE can help me finish trek7 by writing up terminal assigments in Fortan for Linux,Please let me know - I want to get the multiplayer going.but you can't really do assign(file/read '/dev/pts/7') or something to read/write another users STDIN/STDOUT in linux...or can you? I forgot more fortran than I ever learned... I can't code it any more :( Dan.

I am probably one of the few people (only person?) to get a Ph.D. in particle physics without writing a single line of FORTRAN... -tony

On 24 Jun 2011 at 20:59, Dan Gahlinger wrote: I don't think I could ever forget how--I spent too much of my life working on FORTRAN compilers. I got the DEC PDP-10 source code for Adventure from a DEC field engineer about 1974-75 on a reel of 9-track tape (don't laugh--we were still heavily into 7-track). I was surprised to see that it was text packed into binary form--3 7-bit ASCII characters per 36-bit word (you'd have thought that if it was character data, it'd be one character per tape character); converted it to 6 bit display code and unraveled the DEC-10-specific FORTRAN constructs into their CDC 6000 versions (harder than you'd think, particularly with Hollerith constants); transformed the database to be readable by 6000-series FORTRAN I/O and I was off and running. You have no idea how much company computer time was wasted on that thing. The COMSOURCE admins used to conduct sweeps of employee permanent files and purge every copy they could find. So, if this is anything like that DEC 10 version, I can probably lend a hand... --Chuck

Hey Chuck, send me an email off-list Vax fortran in the 70s was kind of an interesting time,some of it was Fortran-IV, some of it was Fortran-77I don't remember any of the things that makes those different or how to distinguish them. I have some code from that time that would compile "back in the day",but that same exact piece of code will NOT compile on vms 7.x with the compaq compiler. It's almost like I need to have a system running vms 4.2 with the fortran of the time to get it to work.I have to assume the resulting binary would work on modern systems? I have some classic game source code from the time I want to get back online and in the archives Fred - I have a 16.2MP Sony digital camera I could use for "scanning" but doing that with a printoutthat is 6" thick will take an obscenely long amount of time. I don't want to separate the pages, I have this massive fear that as soon as I do, they will get out of order... Dan.

I thought about it, but as I mentioned I don't know the difference between Fortran-IV and Fortran-77,so which options do I use? I've had some "Fortran people" tell me the code is Fortran-IV and others tell me it's Fortran-77...not to mention weird "vax-isms" in Fortran of the time period. I have a stack of vaxen sitting here (vaxstation-3000/m76) so I can get at least one running vms 4.2with the old fortran and put the code exactly the way it was at the time and see what happens. or if I'm real lazy I'll setup vms 4.2 on simh and do the same thing :) Dan.

On 27 Jun 2011 at 8:35, Dan Gahlinger wrote: This was a big bone of contention with X3J3 when Fortran 8x (became Fortran 90 because of some of the donnybrooks--it was supposed to have been Fortran-88). Is the role of the ANSI working group to invent language or to certify vendors' extensions to the language? Should X3J3 prohibit the addition of extensions if a vendor wanted to claim ANSI conformance? What should the compiler default be? (CODASYL had gone through the same with COBOL 75 and got to be pretty draconian about extensions to the "standard". But then COBOL was a real mess before 75). Both IBM and DEC tried to throw their weight around by threatening to withdraw from X3J3 on some of these issues. So those dialects based on FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN II could be wildly different. A vendor was supposed to be able to support at a minim something called "USA Basic FORTRAN", which was a very small subset (no logical IF statements, etc.) to claim conformance. But extensions abounded, at least one of which lent itself to ambiguous interpretation--and they were all different--even among compilers N.B. It's "FORTRAN-77", but "Fortran-90" or "FORTRAN-90". --Chuck

On 27 Jun 2011 at 11:16, ben wrote: That was FORTRAN-77. ANSI dropped the Roman numeral business because vendors were appropriating Roman numerals for their own "enhanced" versions of FORTRAN IV. Consider, for example, Univac 1107 FORTRAN V (late 1960's). The other issue is that the Roman numerals didn't identify a specific dialect of FORTRAN, just a basic ill-defined subset. So, instead of punching a "D" in column 1 of a card to signify double-precision in FORTRAN II on the IBM 7090, there was a DOUBLE PRECISION (or DO UBLEP RECISION) type statement in FORTRAN IV. --Chuck

From: Chuck Guzis Sent: Friday, June 24, 2011 7:12 PM I can guarantee you that the ASCII text was packed 5x7bit into the 36 bit words. (I had access to the same source as you worked from since 1977.) Why would anyone waste 25 bits per word to represent ASCII text???? (The hardware includes byte manipulation instructions which work very nicely.) And tape frames are 8 bits + parity, which loses a bit per 7-bit character so why do that? Let the tape controller handle packing a 36 bit word into 5 tape frames, and stop worrying about it. :-) Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Re: On Jun 24, 2011, at 1:12 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Your last question, about the space, got me curious... I took your email (including the embedded quote of Dan's email) and counted: I took the liberty of fixing a few typos (e.g.: paper,standard was changed to "paper, standard" (otherwise that "s" wouldn't be counted), and considered the first letter of a word after a paragraph or sentence break still counted as being after a space. I counted uppercase letters with their lowercase counterparts. The most popular four letters were four of the five of "ETAOI": t (# instances: 61) i (# instances: 49) a (# instances: 47) o (# instances: 37) c (# instances: 35) w (# instances: 32) b (# instances: 28) s (# instances: 28) f (# instances: 20) p (# instances: 17) d (# instances: 14) e (# instances: 14) n (# instances: 14) l (# instances: 13) r (# instances: 12) h (# instances: 11) g (# instances: 8) m (# instances: 8) u (# instances: 6) j (# instances: 3) k (# instances: 3) q (# instances: 2) But, I'm curious...what were the letters you thought would appear more frequently? Stan (probably should be working instead :) Sieler

On Tue, 28 Jun 2011, Stan Sieler wrote: A LOT can be learned from cryptography (which I am almost totally ignorant of) ,for OCR. For example, if we assume (RISKY??) that whitespace is known, a single letter word is PROBABLY one of a very few choices. An important principle to remember is that we can derive a lot of information from the data by paying attention to, and USING, the probabilities and their combinations. Bill Cooper: But isn't "fuzzy logic" just combinatorial probability? Lofti Zadeh: Probably. Using the probabilities may require a LOT of data to work from, not just a few amateur wordy posts. Using another one of the most gross and obvious examples, in general English text, the letter following a 'Q' is generally a 'U', except in characters within acronyms or within or part numbers; in political text, if a word ends in 'q', the word is so likely to be Iraq that much effort can be saved by just looking for confirmation of that rather than struggling with uncertain characters before looking at the word. Likewise in THIS context, the word ending in 'q' is most likely Compaq. The content can also cause ENORMOUS variation. Differences in subject vocabulary can have different frequency statistics. Different scientific disciplines have different vocabularies. And, of course, if somebody had the unenviable task of trying to decode "text-speak" ("C U 4 lunch @ 12?", etc.) there would be different frequencies. (Or email illiteracy of there/their/they're, two/to/too) Not much more than just that letter frequencies of first letters of words should not necessarily be assumed to match the overall frequency, whereas maybe the second or third letter might be a close match. 'E' is not "r at re" as the start of a word, but certainly is NOT the most common first letter. Would it be relevant to glance at the thickness of the sections for the different letters in the dictionary? Well, yes and no. The section length in the dictionary may provide a clue as to how many words start with a given letter, but inaccurately due to the variations in lengths of the definition), and certainly not how frequently said words are used ("the" is generally used more often than "thespian") Some portions of the relative frequencies of letter use are very stable, and some other portions vary wildly. I'm curious about the effects of typos and mispellinqs. You altered the text by correcting our errors. What effect on decoding will the frequency of the words "hte" and "teh" have? There has been some serious research on these subjects, but inadequate application into appropriate fields where that knowledge would be useful, such as OCR, error correction, etc. other than cryptography. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

In article <BLU166-W15779C05467E49AA6C9B24C9520 at phx.gbl>, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> writes: I would use a high resolution digital camera and a tripod and photograph each page. With the right orientation of the printout and the tripod you can photograph all the "odd" pages first and just flip through each pair of pages on the fanfold printout. Then reorient things and flip through all the "even" pages of the printout. A simple shell script will interleave the images back into their original order. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

the OCR is another matter entirely.... steve On 6/24/2011 1:32 PM, steve shumaker wrote: