Re: [TUHS] Failing Memory of an Algol Based System from years ago

["Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>]

The posting of the link

	http://bitsavers.org/pdf/regnecentralen/RC_4000_Reference_Manual_Jun69.pdf

brought back old memories.  When I moved to Aarhus University in
Denmark in December 1973, I found that the Department of Chemistry
where I worked had a Regnecentralen RC-4000 minicomputer with paper
tape input that was used to manage the department's accounting.  It
had a dedicated operator who kept in running nicely until at least
after I left in 1977.  It had too little physical memory to be
considered practical for the quantum chemistry work that I was then
engaged in, and may not even have had a Fortran compiler; instead, we
used the campus CDC 6400 for our research.

In memory of the RC-4000, and Per Brinch Hansen's (13 Nov
1938--31-Jul-2007) many contributions to the literature of computer
science, programming language design, and parallel computing, I
prepared an enhancement of its manual, available here:

	http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/RC-4000/

The Web page that comes up gives a directory of the available files,
and documents the steps needed to produce them.  The result is a
searchable document, with a single page image per PDF page, rather
than the mixed bitmap scan of 1-up and 2-up pages in the original PDF
file.

Despite my 40+ year engagement in the TeX community, I only recently
learned via the texhax mailing of some PDFTeX internals that allow one
to construct a file that can retypeset n-up files into 1-up format.

I therefore make this posting in the hope that someone else might be
encouraged to tackle similar document improvements in the bitsavers
archives.  Although it takes a bit of experimentation, with the
exception of the OCR conversion, the entire operation can be done with
free software on pretty much any modern computing platform, thanks to
the portability of the needed software.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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