30 Jul
2025
30 Jul
'25
12:32 p.m.
I still teach students to print their code and to draw flowcharts. When
I led engineers, it was shocking how many looked at these as archaic
rituals, but when presented with sticky problems that resisted their
onscreen analysis, and told to bring printouts to our meetings were
chagrined when the solution was spotted in relatively short order on
paper or through a flowchart.
My 4k monitor isn't as good as paper a lot of the time. Something about
physical medium just can't be beat.
That said, I heart my giant monitor and wouldn't go printing 1000's of
pages to pore through...
Will
On 7/30/25 2:27 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
On Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 at 11:02 PM,
arnold(a)skeeve.com <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu
wrote:
Getting COFFy
but TUHS bcc, I intend for an upcoming software analysis project to print paper copies and
comb over things very finely with a pen. The project is a thorough Lions-esque analysis
of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the Famicom/NES. I hope once I'm "done" with my
disassembly of it to first print a full copy to sit at coffee shops with and annotate and
then eventually produce something comparable to the Lions' publication but the SMB3
code and an accompanying commentary (typeset with troff of course). How grand it would be
to have the printouts on true terminal fan-fold.
Recently I did spot a Ti hardcopy terminal sitting in a junk pile at the university, I am
forever kicking myself for not grabbing it...it did use some sort of continuous paper, but
looked to have a reel rather than fan-fold uptake, I didn't make note of the model,
only that it had a typical DB-25 (presumably RS-232) serial jack. Granted if I'm
simply printing for analysis waiting for a terminal to print it is overkill...
- Matt G. An extant memento of my home TTY 37 is a stack of
fanfold paper that
accommodated artwork by children and grandchildren. About 1/4".remains
for potential great-grandchildren.
Doug
I really miss 11" x 17" greenbar fanfold paper. It was wonderful
for printing out program listings and reviewing code. One could
make notes on the side of the code, flip back and forth between
different files to see how different data structures were used,
and so on. It was great.
That's how I first learned the gawk code (MUCH smaller at the
time). I printed out the whole thing and read through it, making
notes.
Sigh. The good old days.
Arnold
P.S. Some years ago I went through the binders on my bookshelves to
get rid of things. From that I have a stack about 4 feet high of letter
paper printed one-sided on a laser printer, waiting for use by future
grandchildren. Sadly, not one of my kids is married. (These days my
laser printer does duplex; anything I don't need goes into recycling.)
Whatever. We now return you to our regularly scheduled reminiscing.