From: Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 16:27:30 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <08771638-9900-aea8-0015-93e2fcf25932@mhorton.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4b5f0feb-c473-4087-7b0b-9706bced886f@gmail.com>
Picture tapes. I had a collection of 20 or so. A few of them were girly
pictures, but there were several excellent ones. Nemoy as Spock holding
a model of the Enterprise. Neil Armstrong on the moon. My favorite was
the PSA grinning bird over the San Francisco Bay - it was 8 strips wide.
FORTRAN carriage control to cause overstriking. I recently got my
collection read off the magtape.
My understanding was the a photo was scanned at 256 grayscale levels,
and the program let you tune the contrast with 16 gray levels of
different overstrikes, ranging from 4 blanks to M, W, X, @ overstruck.
There's a tool called asa2pdf that can turn the carriage control files
into PDF, but printing on a laser printer leads to a chore with an
office paper cutter and lots of staples and scotch tape. I put one
together of SAN FRAN as a parting gift to a coworker at my retirement
luncheon.
Mary Ann
On 2/13/21 2:21 PM, Mike Markowski wrote:
> On 2/13/21 3:09 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Sat, 13 Feb 2021, Warner Losh wrote:
>>
>>> I wrote one in 83. And several of my fellow students at college did
>>> this as well. It seemed to be a common thing back in the day.
>>
>> I've used lots of different banner programs on various systems; I
>> think even OS/360 had one (well, ours did anyway).
>>
>> -- Dave
>
> As an undergrad in the early 1980s, posters made from line printer
> strips were popular. Character overstrikes were used as pixels and
> could be discerned as photos from a few feet away. These filled a
> wall in our student office / study area. Given the times & 100% male
> occupancy, let's just say the posters wouldn't fly today... Each
> poster was multiple strips wide. Does such a program ring a bell?
> Ascii art was popular, but I don't recall details on making them.
>
> Mike Markowski
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-02-14 0:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-02-13 9:00 Brian Walden
2021-02-13 15:20 ` Will Senn
2021-02-13 16:57 ` Warner Losh
2021-02-13 20:09 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-13 20:28 ` [TUHS] Any interest in a Dec Alpha or a Sun Sparc 4 Jim Capp
2021-02-13 20:36 ` Earl Baugh
2021-02-13 20:45 ` Jim Capp
2021-02-13 21:24 ` Earl Baugh
2021-02-13 22:13 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2021-02-13 22:21 ` [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable) Mike Markowski
2021-02-14 0:27 ` Mary Ann Horton [this message]
2021-02-14 3:33 ` Will Senn
2021-02-15 17:32 ` Tom Lyon
2021-02-13 17:13 ` Mary Ann Horton
2021-02-16 19:29 Brian Walden
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=08771638-9900-aea8-0015-93e2fcf25932@mhorton.net \
--to=mah@mhorton.net \
--cc=tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).