> On Apr 27, 2022, at 1:22 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On 4/26/22 20:10, ben via cctalk wrote:
>> On 2022-04-26 8:48 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
>>
>>> CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office
>>> typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it.
>>>
>>
>> Well you can't have them use IBM equipment.
>> Looking at some IBM DOC's from the 60's
>> they had boxed tables for computer formats
>> but using real box characters.
>>
>> +----+----+
>> | xxx| xxx|
>> +----+----+
>>
>> How did they print that?
>
> Cut and paste. Consider the S/360 Assembler (F) manual:
>
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C26-3756-2_Assembler_F_Programmers_Guide_196711.pdf
>
> Look at PDF page 10. Note the box at the bottom of the page and how
> it's not even perfectly horizontal at the borders. In fact, it looks to
> be hand-drawn. I suspect that things were put together the old
> way--with scissors and rubber cement.
Or the way newspapers did it: with sticky wax applied to the back of the strips
of phototypesetter output, along with rolls of "border tape" to lay down the
straight lines.
Re OCR-B: the difference between zero and O in that font is small enough that
contemporary OCR could not reliably tell the two apart. This is documented in
detail in "Travels in Computerland" by Ben R. Schneider, a book about his
project to digitize a multi-volume printed document in the early 1970s. It
involved having it typed (in Hong Kong I think) using OCR-B type balls, and
when they ran into the OCR issue it was worked around by modifying the type
balls to give one of the two characters a cut in the left side, making it like
a reversed C. OCR sure has come a long way since then.
Yes, OCR-A is extremely ugly; Schneider actually considered it before
dismissing it, on the grounds its letter forms are so bad that proofreaders
trying to check the as-typed material would have a hard time dealing with it
and quality would suffer as a result.
paul
