Mona Lisa

[Paul Anderson]

Great war story. That was not my favorite printer to work on.  One of our
cuseomers had the moon and it was very nice. I've seen a lot of others, and
at one time had a tape loaded with them. I'll look for it when i get moved
back in.

Paul

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Rick Murphy <rick at rickmurphy.net> wrote:

> At 11:45 PM 10/10/2008, Megan Gentry wrote:
>
>> I had a number of those pictures on a tape I loaned to someone...
>>
>
> I have a tape somewhere with a bunch of those as well. I really should try
> to read it and see if it's still OK.
>
> A related war story (software breaking hardware): way back when (late '70s)
> I was printing the moon image (something like 4 panels wide by six panels
> high) on what I think was a DEC LP05 - a drum printer. This printer had
> hammers that fired to hit the ribbon at the right time when a character on
> the drum was in the right position. The printer had 66 hammers on a shuttle
> that moved back and forth to print even then odd characters across the 132
> column page.
>
> Normally, you feed it a line and it prints half the columns, then shuttles
> over and prints the next half. Linefeed, print half, then shuttle again.
> Well, these printer images were heavily overprinted with lots of blank
> spaces, so you spent a lot of time shuttling the heads back and forth while
> printing just a few characters.
>
> So, I got smart. Wrote a program to convert the input so that the printer
> was fed all of the even characters (with spaces for the odd ones),
> overprinting as necessary, then fed the odd characters. I did this to save
> all the time spent shifting the hammer bank back and forth. It would take
> less time to feed to the printer, and would print a lot more quickly.
>
> Well, I fired it up and sent the output to the printer, which printed VERY
> loudly for about a minute then blew the circuit breaker. Too much, too fast,
> I guess. :-)
>        -Rick
>
>