OT: A blast from the past

[Evan]

From the early days of computer graphics...

For XP users:

Go to Start>Run and type in cmd

Click OK

At the DOS prompt type:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

and press return.

Somebody has much too much spare time...

[This message has been edited by Evan (edited 01-12-2006).]

[cuemaker]

Thats is funny

[Lee Paul]

Evan.........Thanks

BTW......works on Win2000 also

LP

[3 Phase Lightbulb]

There used to be a few ASCII movies made when 1200/2400 came out, then a bunch of them came out when 9600 became popular.

Gray scale ASCII art was also big:

http://www.bbssystem.com/ascii.txt


[This message has been edited by 3 Phase Lightbulb (edited 01-12-2006).]

[Evan]

I made a scanner for a dot matrix printer I had in about 1980 or so. It was a focused photocell mounted above the printhead. It went to an A to D converter and then my software would automatically generate ASCII art images from photos put through the printer.

[IOWOLF]

No wonder XP is so big and costly.

------------------
The tame Wolf !

[Schutzhund]

I wonder what my kids will think of THOSE special effects! (lol). When I was a kid, the special effects in Star Wars were state of the art. My kids watched episodes 1-3 before 4-6 (the original trilogy) and were disappointed with the "cheesy" special effects.

While we are on the subject, can someone explain to me when Storm Troopers became Clone Troopers?

I have a habit of calling the Clone Trooper action figures Storm Troopers and my kids correct me... "Those are CLONE Troopers Daddy!"

I retort: "Well, one day they will grow up to be STORM Troopers!"

[3 Phase Lightbulb]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Evan:
I made a scanner for a dot matrix printer I had in about 1980 or so. It was a focused photocell mounted above the printhead. It went to an A to D converter and then my software would automatically generate ASCII art images from photos put through the printer.</font>

When I was a kid I made a digitizer for my apple ][ using an LM1881 sync splitter, a couple of 4-bit cascaded counters, some latches/registers, and a composite video amplifier circuit that drove the video signal into the cassette audio IN port. For the apple interface, All I had was one 8 bit register that was a scan line counter (two cascaded 4-bit counters driven by Hsync from the LM1881, reset by Vsync).

I then programmed the Apple to poll the current scan line indicator until it was 0, then read the Apple cassette IN register 30 or so times (yielded about 3/4 of a scan line time-wise). I then went back to polling the current scan line indicator until it changed to the next scan line (In this case 0 to 1), then went back and read the cassette port another 30 times or so, etc.

I was able to get some very noisy and crude 30x200 images for my first composite video digitizer. Later I built some stand alone image processing systems that let me sample frames of video, perform hardware subtraction of video frames (quickly pinpoint video frame deltas for object tracking, etc.) I'm sure there are a bunch of surveillance systems out there that are tracking/controlling pan/tilt units using one of my designs. Then I built even more complicated image processing systems for metrology and complex inspection systems.

-Adrian

[Evan]

Heh. Back in high school in the early 60s I built a flying spot scanner with discrete video op-amp that could display images on an oscilloscope. We didn't have any computer that could have digitized the images back then. At that time I was programming a Bendix G-15 (vacuum tubes).

I scrounged floor sweepings from manufacturers like Fairchild in Silicon Valley. I was designing and building my own discrete CPU. I actually got much of it working at the 4 bit level but ran into problems with ram. It just took too much power to run enough bipolar xistors to make a couple of hundred flip flops.

[cam m]

Back in high school the teacher took the first 2 weeks of the grade 10 physics course to teach the class to use a slide rule. Mine was Bamboo, but several class mates had the new plastic ones.
My first computer course in University used punch cards.
I now have more memory and data processing power sitting on my desk than the whole Engineering faculty had when I was an undergrad.
I feel old.
Cam