11 Feb
2021
11 Feb
'21
8:52 a.m.
The Hershey fonts were what we had, they kinda sucked but you worked
with them. I think is a passage, you know those fonts, you were there,
it was not great. People who haven't been there have no idea how lucky
they are.
On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 06:30:31PM -0800, Mary Ann Horton 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).
On 2/10/21 5:53 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>Ron. That???s awesome.?? Ferrin used the Same set of Hersey Font that the
>XGP used.?? He got them from Stanford as I recall but they were publically
>(aka open source)
>
>On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 7:28 PM Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com
><mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
>
> We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for
> which it
> wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output
> filters
> for the lineprinter and the Diablos.
>
> Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec
> printers.
> ?? ?? I don???t knwo wher Berkely???s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU
> verset
> had an amusing history on that.
>
> George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out
> the fonts in large point size on film.?? ?? In the basement of the
> biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope
> which
> used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so)
> framebuffer.?? ?? George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad
> hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope. ?? Then he
> put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the
> sense
> wire from the microscope to that.
>
> He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner. ??He???d tape
> one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope
> sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.?? ??
> Then
> without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he???d boot up
> miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
> After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT
> emulator.
>
> I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified
> project
> so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings
> (automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and
> bottom).
> ?? ?? Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with
> various laserprinters.?? ?? I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM???s
> doc style when we were contracting with them.
>
> This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to
> Framemaker.
>
>
>
>--
>Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm