[COFF] [TUHS] Re: greenbar fanfold paper - anyone else miss it?

[Will Senn]

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 at skeeve.com <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>> Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
> 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.