Versatec and Printronix (was: Re: ASCII art pictures

From: Charles P. Hobbs <transit_at_lerctr.org>
Date: Wed May 24 11:39:38 2000

On Wed, 24 May 2000, McFadden, Mike wrote:

> There was "actual" work done using ascii art. We used to plot growth curves
> of bacteria using ASCII characters. We looked at the growth patterns of
> 1000's of samples with varying concentrations of antibiotics included. This
> was very cumbersome and slow. We then purchased a Versatec printer to speed
> the process. Still ASCII plots but faster. One research run would consume
> an entire box of versatec paper. For recreation I developed a raster
> plotting version on the Versatec but it was much slower and computer
> intensive, it did do b/w pictures nicely.

At my school (UC Santa Barbara, 1983-1987) a few of the "engineering" and
"research" VAXen had Versatec printers. (They were considered too
expensive for normal undergraduate use).



> The next refinement after plain
> ASCII printer art was output on a Printronix P300 or P600. You could print
> raster pictures. The sound of the printer tipped off the staff to the
> production of a picture.

The UCSB Computer Center had a Printronix that could print dot-matrix
printers, when sent the right codes. The UNIX plot commands worked nicely
with it (as well as the Versatec's over in Engineering), giving me a few
extra points in a lab writeup for a class that I was otherwise failing ...

There was also a filter for troff output that would print on the
Printronix, but it was kind of flakey (due to the limited memory on the
PDP-11's over at the Computer Center)
Received on Wed May 24 2000 - 11:39:38 BST