14 Feb
2021
14 Feb
'21
1:27 a.m.
Picture tapes. I had a collection of 20 or so. A few of them were girly
pictures, but there were several excellent ones. Nemoy as Spock holding
a model of the Enterprise. Neil Armstrong on the moon. My favorite was
the PSA grinning bird over the San Francisco Bay - it was 8 strips wide.
FORTRAN carriage control to cause overstriking. I recently got my
collection read off the magtape.
My understanding was the a photo was scanned at 256 grayscale levels,
and the program let you tune the contrast with 16 gray levels of
different overstrikes, ranging from 4 blanks to M, W, X, @ overstruck.
There's a tool called asa2pdf that can turn the carriage control files
into PDF, but printing on a laser printer leads to a chore with an
office paper cutter and lots of staples and scotch tape. I put one
together of SAN FRAN as a parting gift to a coworker at my retirement
luncheon.
Mary Ann
On 2/13/21 2:21 PM, Mike Markowski wrote:
On 2/13/21 3:09 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sat, 13 Feb 2021, Warner Losh wrote:
As an undergrad in the early 1980s, posters made from line printer
strips were popular. Character overstrikes were used as pixels and
could be discerned as photos from a few feet away. These filled a
wall in our student office / study area. Given the times & 100% male
occupancy, let's just say the posters wouldn't fly today... Each
poster was multiple strips wide. Does such a program ring a bell?
Ascii art was popular, but I don't recall details on making them.
Mike Markowski
I wrote one in 83. And several of my fellow
students at college did
this as well. It seemed to be a common thing back in the day.
I've used lots of different banner programs on various systems; I
think even OS/360 had one (well, ours did anyway).
-- Dave