3 Sep
2026
3 Sep
'26
12:16 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 3, 2026 at 9:35 AM Joe George via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I have a collection of old 1403 "carriage control" printer art that came from
Princeton University at one point.
I found copies online looking for "Princeton Pictures Tape". Some of them are
HUGE (20-25 printed pages
taped together, all with like 4-5 line overstrike.
You can find all the Princeton Picture Tape files, in both ASCII and
EBCDIC, along with the whole story, by starting at:
https://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/ASCII/
I had the PSA jet flying over the Golden Gate Bridge covering one wall
of my office in the 1980s. This is the largest ASCII art piece that
I'm aware of. IIRC it's 96 pages of full-sized lineprinter (greenbar
sized) paper arranged in 8 columns of 12 pages with something like up
to 7 overstrikes per line.
I have attached my somewhat hacked together digital rendering of this
image, created by running it through Virtual1403 and then manually
assembling the resulting PDF page strips. Inter-strip gaps aren't
perfect, but it was tough to get right with an actual printout too
lol.