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From: Brian Walden <tuhs@cuzuco.com>
To: <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 04:00:03 -0500 (EST)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <202102130900.11D903MT021054@cuzuco.com> (raw)

Thank you for banner! I used the data, abliet modified, 40 years ago
in 1981, for a banner program as well, on an IBM 1130 (manufactured 1972)
so it could print on an 1132 line printer. The floor would vibrate
when it printed those banners. I used "X" as the printed char as the
1132 did not have the # char. But those banners looked great!
I wrote it in FORTRAN IV. On punched cards. I did this because
from 1980-1982 I only had access to UNIX on Monday evenings from
7PM-9PM, using a DEC LA120 terminal, it was slow and never had
enough ink on the ribbon.

I had only 8K of core memory with only EBCIDIC uppercase so there
were lots of compromises and cleverness needed -
- read in a 16-bit integer as a packed two 8-bit numbers
- limit the banner output to only A-Za-z0-9 !?#@'*+,-.=
- unpack the char data into buffer and then process it.
- fix the "U" charater data
- find the run-lenght ecnodings that could be consoldated to save space
  (seeing those made me think it had to have been generated data)

The program still survives here - http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/
(with sample output runs)

Also since I had to type all those numbers onto punch cards
with a 029 keypunch, to speed things up I coded my own free-form
atoi() equivalent in FORTRAN, reading cards, then packed two numbers into
a integer, then punch out those numbers along with card ID numbers in columns
73-80 on the 1442.  This was many weeks of keypunching, checking,
fixing and re-keypunching.
That code is here http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/ipack.html

When done the deck was around 8" or so. It took well over a
minute to read in the data cards, after complition.

Again thanks! Many hundreds of banners for many people were printed
by this, around 2 to 3 a week, until July 1982, when that IBM
was replaced by a Prime system. I still have many found memeories of
that 1130.

-Brian

Mary Ann Horton (mah at mhorton.net) wrote:
> We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter,
> 4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.
>
> It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of
> parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.
>
> I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by
> dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts
> reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.
>
> I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the
> largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times
> fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but
> there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came
> along and it was moot.
>
> I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size,
> from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).


             reply	other threads:[~2021-02-13  9:16 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-02-13  9:00 Brian Walden [this message]
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
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

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