Typing in lost code

[Jonathan Chapman]

I recently dealt with this with the DaJen SCI monitor listing out of the manual. The copy is pretty bad, and either their printer was having issues, or slashing of "zero" vs "O" was inconsistent somehow. OCRing it produced more of a mess than just sitting with the original and a text editor open side-by-side.

I can't imagine it would've worked out well to have someone who wasn't familiar with 8080 assembly language transcribe it, I had a rough enough time on my own, and ended up having to compare the assembly output to a known-good ROM dump to get the last of the discrepancies out.

Thanks,
Jonathan

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Sunday, January 23rd, 2022 at 10:11, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> I've run into that situation too, with listings so difficult that even a commercial OCR program (FineReader) couldn't handle it. At the time Tesseract was far less capable, though I haven't tried it recently to see if that has changed.
>
> Anyway, my experience was that the task was hard enough that it needed someone with knowledge of the material. It may be a contract typist could do a tolerable job but I have my doubts. Typing, say, an obsolete assembly language program if you see it merely as a random collection of characters is going to produce more errors than if the person doing the typing actually understands what the material means.
>
> One consideration is the effort required to repair transcription errors. Those that produce syntax errors aren't such an issue; those that pass the assembler or compiler but result in bugs (say, a mistyped register number) are harder to find.
>
> paul
>
> > On Jan 22, 2022, at 8:57 PM, Mark Kahrs via cctalk cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
> >
> > No, OCR totally fails on olde line printer listing. At least the ones I've
> >
> > tried (tesseract, online, ...)
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 8:06 PM Ethan O'Toole ethan at 757.org wrote:
> >
> > > Can the listings be OCR'ed?
> > >
> > >                        - Ethan
> > >
> > >
> > > > Has anyone ever used Amazon Mechanical Turk to employ typists to type in
> > > >
> > > > old listings of lost code?
> > > >
> > > > Asking for a friend.