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* Re: [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)
@ 2021-02-16 19:29 Brian Walden
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 10+ messages in thread
From: Brian Walden @ 2021-02-16 19:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

BTW that is the same Sam Harbison that co-authored "C: A Reference Manual" -
https://www.amazon.com/Reference-Manual-Samuel-P-Harbison/dp/013089592X

His memorial page is here -
https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/samuel-p-harbison-74

Those in the Pittsburgh area will recognize that family name.

His father (also Samuel P. Harbison) obituary is here -
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/20/archives/samuel-harbison-dies-in-pittsburgh.html

Some information on his grandfather (and yes, also Samuel P. Harbison) is here -
https://sites.google.com/site/1009davisavenue/history
who ran this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbison-Walker_Refractories_Company

Tom Lyon <pugs at ieee.org>) wrote:
> I believe many of these images, especially Spock, came from Sam Harbison
> (RIP) at Princeton.
> They were EBCDIC art, not ASCII!  Made on the IBM/360 with the 1403 printer.
> See http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/ASCII/

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 10+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)
@ 2021-02-13  9:00 Brian Walden
  2021-02-13 15:20 ` Will Senn
  2021-02-13 17:13 ` Mary Ann Horton
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 10+ messages in thread
From: Brian Walden @ 2021-02-13  9:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

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).


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 10+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-02-16 19:31 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-02-16 19:29 [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable) Brian Walden
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
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 22:21       ` 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

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