9/1/2023 0 Comments Data punch tape creator![]() ![]() Finally, the computer started to output the Gaussian abscissas and weights. The SEAC computed and computed and computed and computed. We manually set n = 20, crossed our fingers, held our breath, and pushed the button to run the program. The tape was converted automatically to a wire, and the wire cartridge was inserted in the SEAC. I (or Phil) punched up the code on teletype tape and checked that out. I reread my code and checked it for bugs. I tried to anticipate what scaling would be necessary. """I wrote the code and Phil wrote the double- precision part. Quoting from "Remembering Philip Rabinowitz ( ) by Philip J. Here's a fun anecdote along these lines from the 1950s. Would being able to "subsample" individual film grains allow extracting a tiny bit more detail? I wonder whether that applies still to historical film photos or if digital scanners have already surpassed the resolution of the original media to the point of saturation. This would also be a rare codec where future increases in decoder technology can actually increase the quality of the decoded output, assuming that the printer and scanner currently have similar DPI. With modern equipment, it'd certainly be much higher quality than a JPEG encoded at the (albeit conservative) ~200 kB estimates given for the lossless formats. I guess the comparison would be with the "decoded" result, which'd be the raw output of the scanner. Joking aside, if you tolerate lossy "compression", it'd be interesting to see what the characteristics of printing an image are in terms of image codec metrics. Perhaps it would make a good future interview question. ![]() G) All of the above with all colors that a printer can produce permitted.?Īn interesting question in information storage/retrieval, no? Given a Printer of X DPI printing capacity, and an OCR of Y DPI scanning capacity:Ī) What algorithm or algorithms should be used to put the maximum amount of information that can be reliably scanned (100% accuracy every time!) back onto the the page?Ĭ) What checksumming/CRC/hash/error correcting method should be used to insure 100% accuracy?ĭ) Are there any other potential snags or gotchas, such as the inability to print and/or scan on a specific part of a page and/or issues with inks fading over time, etc., etc.?Į) All of the above with only black and white permitted.?į) All of the above with grayscale permitted.? Which leads to another interesting question! Oh sure, it wouldn't store Gigabytes of information, or even Megabytes or Killobytes - but you could probably fit some early historical computer programs onto standard printer paper - just printed as dot patterns! On that note, if one wanted to make an improvised data storage device, for storing very small amounts of data (for let's say, a future Zombie Apocalypse, or what-have-you!) - then what about using a Printer/OCR combo - to store small amounts of data (relatively speaking!) - as graphical designs, dot graphs, similar to punch cards, in effect, on pieces of ordinary printer paper? You know, punched card decks used to store data - very small amounts of data, at least relative to tapes - which in turn stored very small amounts of data relative to disk drives, etc., etc. Sure, there were typewriters and printers for interactive use, but without magnetic tape or anything like a floppy, this is how you stored your program in a machine readable way. Just take that subroutine from one stack and slip it into your program's pile before your next run. Need to fix a bug? Make a new punch card for that line of code and swap it out. A stack of cards? That's akin to a single file, with each line of text data being an individual card. I thought it was some pedantic formatting thing. Even today, many IDEs will draw a line at 80 columns. How many characters can a card hold? 80, of course. (Cards can hold binary data as well, but I'm talking about the cards used by programmers and for data input by secretaries - say for new account info, etc.) As you type out the card, the holes are punched and the character is printed along the top, so humans can read it. I may have had the idea that developers back then were writing in binary or something. Usually this was a single line of FORTRAN or COBOL code, but it could also be data like a person's name, age, etc. ![]() Then it suddenly clicked.Įach punch card represents a single line of plain text. I didn't really grok how punch cards worked until I went to the Computer History Museum and typed one out myself. ![]()
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