For years JHU had a KSR37 with a Greek box and nroff drove it direcly
sending all those ESC-8 and ESC-9 things. There were some output
filters that converted this to things like the Diablo daisy wheels and
even the rather crude dot matrix lineprinter we had.
Eventually, George Toth, one of our programmers came up with the idea of
building a C/A/T simulator. He went to the Naval Research Lab and
printed out a full typeface on film from their CAT. He then cut them
out and glued them to the front of an oscilliscope, one letter at a
time.
There was a PDP-11/20 that ran a Scanning Transmission Electron
Microscope (at the time one of the few in captivity). He would take
the scanning driver cables from the microscope and put them on the X/Y
of the oscilliscope and then took the sense wire and put it on a
photomultiplier tube that was mounted in a scope camera. He then fired
up the (DOS/BATCH) microscope software to tell it to do a scan. He’d
then swap the RK05 packs and bring up Minunix and read his scanned
character out of the frame buffer.
One character at a time he accumulated an entire Roman, Bold, Italic,
and Symbol set. He wrote the emulator and we could TROFF through his
software to the Versatec lineprinter we had. The chemicals from those
printers makes my skin break out just thinking about it. It was the
only printer we had at BRL for political reasons for quite a while. It
also would eat the ink of the government issued (made oddly by a
workshop for the blind) pens.
-Ron
