[TUHS] Re: FD 2

["Ronald Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com>]

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
>