[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976))

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Thu Feb 11 10:36:40 AEST 2021


On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 12:27:17AM +0000, Ron Natalie wrote:
> George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out the
> fonts in large point size on film.    In the basement of the biophysics
> bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope which used a
> PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so) framebuffer.
> George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad hooked them up to the X
> and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope.    Then he put a photomutlipler tube in
> a scope camera housing and hoked the sense wire from the microscope to that.
> 
> He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner.   He???d tape one
> letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope sofware
> (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.    Then without
> powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he???d boot up miniunix and
> copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
> After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT emulator.

That's dedication, what else did George do?


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