[TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007)

For years JHU had a KSR37 with a Greek box and nroff drove it direcly sending all those ESC-8 and ESC-9 things. There were some output filters that converted this to things like the Diablo daisy wheels and even the rather crude dot matrix lineprinter we had. Eventually, George Toth, one of our programmers came up with the idea of building a C/A/T simulator. He went to the Naval Research Lab and printed out a full typeface on film from their CAT. He then cut them out and glued them to the front of an oscilliscope, one letter at a time. There was a PDP-11/20 that ran a Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope (at the time one of the few in captivity). He would take the scanning driver cables from the microscope and put them on the X/Y of the oscilliscope and then took the sense wire and put it on a photomultiplier tube that was mounted in a scope camera. He then fired up the (DOS/BATCH) microscope software to tell it to do a scan. He’d then swap the RK05 packs and bring up Minunix and read his scanned character out of the frame buffer. One character at a time he accumulated an entire Roman, Bold, Italic, and Symbol set. He wrote the emulator and we could TROFF through his software to the Versatec lineprinter we had. The chemicals from those printers makes my skin break out just thinking about it. It was the only printer we had at BRL for political reasons for quite a while. It also would eat the ink of the government issued (made oddly by a workshop for the blind) pens. -Ron