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From: werme@Alliant.COM (Ric Werme)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <2967@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Date: 8 Feb 89 05:42:05 GMT
References: <1000@taux01.UUCP> <3292@ima.ima.isc.com>
Reply-To: werme@alliant.Alliant.COM (Ric Werme)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Littleton, MA
Lines: 50

In article <3292@ima.ima.isc.com> johnl@ima.UUCP (John R. Levine) writes:
>In another case, we experimented with the carriage control tape.  Things like
>"skip to new page" or "vertical tab" were implemented with a loop of paper
>tape that had 66 rows, one for each line on a page, and 12 columns.

At Carnegie -Mellon, the standard carriage tape had an empty channel.  An
easy way to get on the bad side of the operators was to use the right
character as a fortran print control character.  (The tape was designed so
that the printer implemented nearly all of the fortran carriage control
features.)  It was never a problem until someone wrote a SNOBOL program and
forgot to print a space at the beginning of each line.  The operator wasn't
ear the machine at the time and 1403 fed the paper faster than it could stack!>
>There was a legendary card deck that, when run through an old electromechanical
>accounting machine, would print out an American flag while playing the
>Star Spangled Banner.

I hearby claim the best sound of any printer music.  At Sanders Technology,
a defunct company that pioneered the letter quality dot matrix printer, I
decided to come up with some real music.  After a disappointing start, I
designed some fonts that were variable numbers of vertical bars in 1/2 inch
wide characters.  The printer's horizontal resolution was 0.001", better than
laser printers, but not good enough for decent music.  I had to compute line
spacings in 0.0001" units and round to the nearest 0.001".  About an octave
and a half would fit in a 2Kb PROM (this was before 16K ram chips made down-
loaded fonts practical).  Next I arranged "A Bicycle Built for Two", since that
was the first song a computer ever played (you've heard it in the movie 2001).
It also was a hack on Daisywheel terminals, our main competition.  It was
impressive.  And attracted a fair amount of attention at the trade shows.

I later did three Christmas carols, and even a version of Le Marseilles (sp?)
for a potential French customer.

Since the only real language we had was Fortran, I wrote TECO programs to
generate the font from a source file of frequency and character bindings, and
another TECO program that read a simple music language and generated the
lines of text needed to play the song.  Not only could I set the meter, the
program had to reverse the order of the characters for the right-left passes.

I still have two of those printers.  NH Mensa prints its newsletters on one.
Unfortunately, I'm running out of ribbons and the pins are beginning to
crack.  Smart printer.  Does its own justification, handles proportional
fonts, mixed fonts, all sorts of stuff.  Its control language is readable,
inspired by runoff.  Between the printer, a CP/M system and a screen editor
(written as a macro for a TECO variant), who needs an IBM PC?

-- 

| A pride of lions              | Eric J Werme                |
| A gaggle of geese             | uucp: decvax!linus!alliant  |
| An odd lot of programmers     | Phone: 603-673-3993         |