Recovering the ROM of an IBM 5100 using OCR (among other things)

[Boris Gimbarzevsky]

That was a very interesting read!  The type of 
thing I could see myself doing over 40 years ago 
when once I'd come up with a neat idea and either 
did preliminary coding or hardware design 
suggesting it would work I'd jump right into it 
and find optimistic 1 month project timelines 
stretching to 6+ months.  My approach now would 
be to just use a logic analyzer or a number of 
Propeller boards to sample all of the lines from 
ROS as very sedate clock speed that the 5100 uses.

Still, this has applications beyond original goal 
and could use it to acquire patient lab data from 
hospital EMR's which are increasingly locked 
down.  Used  to be I could export a  patients lab 
results to a text file easily to graph them out 
vs time or look at correlations between various 
lab values.  Now that's forbidden as one is only 
allowed to look at them on the screen or use the 
abysmal graphing functionality which is very 
poorly coded and makes a PDP-8 doing the same 
functionality seem like a 
supercomputer.  Thus,  one could simply point a 
cell phone camera at the screen, record the lab 
results  scrolling by and then do OCR on the 
series of images to create a data file of all of 
the lab results  one is interested  in.  I've 
just photographed results on a screen as takes 
less room than another sheet of paper.

>This is *epic*.
>
>https://github.com/stepleton/5100NonExecutableROSDecode/blob/master/WRITEUP.md
>
>--
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