Re: [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)

[Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net>]

Thank you for the kind words, and the inspiring story of your port to 
FORTRAN! I was surprised to find there is a Wikipedia page for the 
banner program.

This brings back earlier memories for me. In High School in 1972, our 
school had an ASR33 and dial-up access to an HP BASIC system. We were 
also lucky enough to be part of a scouting program that gave us access 
to a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe at nearby Gulf General Atomic, where we could 
keypunch and run FORTRAN programs and print onto a fast line printer.

One of my programs was a simpler banner program, printing large sideways 
banners with the 5x7 dot matrix I'd seen on Decwriters and CRT 
terminals. I drew and typed in the data by hand, a far simpler job since 
it was only 5x7, and the output was blocky.

I supported upper and lower case, but like the terminals, there was no 
room below the baseline for descenders, and characters like "g" wound up 
elevated. I printed our high school catch phrase, "Debug Off Line!", and 
posted above the ASR33 at school. I got lots of crap about how the g 
looked like a 9.

One friend signed my senior high school yearbook with the tag line 
"Debu9 Off Line!"

On 2/13/21 1:00 AM, Brian Walden wrote:
> 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.
>