13 Feb
2021
13 Feb
'21
6:13 p.m.
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.