Re: Code Width and Comment Style (Was: What counts as a fork?)

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 1:41 AM, Paige DePol <lual@serfnet.org> wrote:
> Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "High-speed" printers (heck, some of them could do several pages
>> per minute) had 132 columns. The IBM printer at our university in
>> 1966 had 132 hammers and a slidebar with about 50 glyphs . As the
>> correct glyph passed the hammer, it would strike. The sequence
>> was carefully scrambled to make the moments of impact more or
>> less random, so that printing a line would sound like somone
>> riffling a deck of cards. Of course, the students (which may or may
>> not have included me) figured out what that sequence was and
>> made the printer print it. The hammers did not quite strike at the
>> same instant, it took maybe 0.05 of a second, but printing a page
>> of those lines made the printer sound like a very loud metronome.
>> Alas, the slidebar tended to break during those pages :-(
>
> Back in the day, I got a nice 24-pin dot matrix printer. It printed like
> nothing else I had seen before, such well defined characters.
>
> I decided that since it was capable of doing graphics I wrote a program
> that converted source code into the appropriate graphics so when I printed
> source code it would look on the page exactly the same as on my screen,
> special characters, inverted video, everything.
>
> I have always been a bit of a night-owl, so when I wrote that program and
> decided to test it by printing out a bunch of source code... well lets just
> say that a 24-pin dot matrix printer, printing two source lines at a time in
> bi-directional quality mode, was not exactly quiet.
>
> I was no longer allowed to print things at 3am after that! ;)
>
> ~Paige

BWYAAAAAAAAAOW

BWYAAAAAAAAAOW

BWYAAAAAAAAAOW

That's a sound you never forget. XD

The startup self-test sound of the Imagewriter II printer is also very
memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5kG3E5Jolg

/s/ Adam