[TUHS] Re: FD 2

[Brantley Coile <brantley@coraid.com>]

What a great story!

On January 23, 2023 9:25:25 AM EST, Ronald Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>Indeed but the output format was not too hard to decipher and we wrote drivers for other things.
>
>One of the most odd projects I helped with was a program called verset which was a C/A/T type setter emulator that output to a Versetec printer plotter.
>This was my friend George Toth’s baby.   What he did was go down to the NRL and get a complete printout of the typefaces on their C/A/T printed on film at about 72pt.
>He then cut them into individual pieces.    He build a flying spot scanner out of an oscilliscoe with a photomultiplier tube in a scope camera housing.
>
>Now in the building next to ours was at the time the worlds finest Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope.    It was driven by a PDP-11/20.   Esentially the beam scanned back and forth and there was a detected at the bottom.  So George, would take the drive and sense wires off the microscope and connect them to the oscilloscope/camera combination.  He’d take one letter and stick it to the face of the oscilliscope.   We would then bring up the microscope software and tell it to scan a sample.   It would do so loading the image into the framebuffer.    We would then boot up MiniUnix and read the data out of the framebuffer and store it on an RK05 pack that we’d later take over to our main machine, the PDP-11/45 running a full up (hacked V6) UNIX.
>
>It was probably the worlds most expensive text scanner in the world.   Of course, I did some favors for that department, so I got free access to that machine when it wasn’t being used by actual microscope operators.
>
>------ Original Message ------
>From "Brantley Coile" <brantley@coraid.com>
>To "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
>Cc tuhs@tuhs.org
>Date 1/23/2023 6:49:03 AM
>Subject [TUHS] Re: FD 2
>
>> Original troff targeted only the C/A/T typesetter.
>> bwc
>> 
>