[TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)

[Mary Ann Horton]

Picture tapes. I had a collection of 20 or so. A few of them were girly 
pictures, but there were several excellent ones. Nemoy as Spock holding 
a model of the Enterprise. Neil Armstrong on the moon. My favorite was 
the PSA grinning bird over the San Francisco Bay - it was 8 strips wide. 
FORTRAN carriage control to cause overstriking. I recently got my 
collection read off the magtape.

My understanding was the a photo was scanned at 256 grayscale levels, 
and the program let you tune the contrast with 16 gray levels of 
different overstrikes, ranging from 4 blanks to M, W, X, @ overstruck.

There's a tool called asa2pdf that can turn the carriage control files 
into PDF, but printing on a laser printer leads to a chore with an 
office paper cutter and lots of staples and scotch tape. I put one 
together of SAN FRAN as a parting gift to a coworker at my retirement 
luncheon.

     Mary Ann

On 2/13/21 2:21 PM, Mike Markowski wrote:
> On 2/13/21 3:09 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Sat, 13 Feb 2021, Warner Losh wrote:
>>
>>> I wrote one in 83. And several of my fellow students at college did 
>>> this as well. It seemed to be a common thing back in the day.
>>
>> I've used lots of different banner programs on various systems; I 
>> think even OS/360 had one (well, ours did anyway).
>>
>> -- Dave
>
> As an undergrad in the early 1980s, posters made from line printer 
> strips were popular.  Character overstrikes were used as pixels and 
> could be discerned as photos from a few feet away.  These filled a 
> wall in our student office / study area.  Given the times & 100% male 
> occupancy, let's just say the posters wouldn't fly today...  Each 
> poster was multiple strips wide.  Does such a program ring a bell?  
> Ascii art was popular, but I don't recall details on making them.
>
> Mike Markowski
>