The Mythical \"X on a Dumb Terminal\" server, part 53

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

In article <16524 at brl-adm.ARPA> valdis at sun.mcs.clarkson.edu writes:
> [ ... ]  OK - all you OLD TIMERS out there - has ANYBODY ever seen a terminal
>that gave you a ** two by four ** character matrix?? *AND* downloadable fonts?
>*AND* didn't have a video generator that forced one blank pixel between chars
>and two between rows like a lot do, so you have all-points-addressable?

OLD timer, indeed! :-)

A few years back, I had the misfortune of owning a Kurzweil 4000 OCR
system. The operator console would display the text as it was recognized,
with questionable characters highlighted. You could get a graphic display
of the character as it appeared on the page via one of the function keys.

I discovered (accidently) one day that the system displayed this graphic
by mapping the raster image into a series of ASCII characters representing
the various combinations of "bitmap cells."

I don't know how many fonts this took (or what the cell size was) however
they had to have mapped the entire range of cells in, as the image was
a complete one in all respects.

The terminal was manufactured by Microterm. I don't know if Microterm
or Xerox were responsible for the modifications...

-- 
{alberta,pyramid,uunet}!ncc!lyndon  lyndon at Nexus.CA