Typewriter Art

A £5 typewriter beats a £50,000 Lexus any day!

Many moons ago, it was the thing for bored computer programmers / operators to make the line printers spit out portraits of whatever. We used to call it "ASCII Art." It's good to see that the desire to make mechanical art hasn't been smothered with the invention of Photoshop.

ASCII art is still used in the text NFO's of most movie and game "pirate" groups.

How about the title pages on BBS's? Some of those were pretty intensive.

For those of you too young to recognize the term "BBS", it was the forerunner to the WWW. Damn, I feel old.

Very cool and artistic!

Can you still get fan fold paper so you can print a banner?

Has anyone else used a clothes iron to flatten Hollereth computer punch cards after coffee got spilled on them? It worked!

@KDP: I wrote code to create letters/words in ASCII art! And, yes, I had a BBS aimed at kids wanting to practice their English.

@BMN: My ship in the Navy had one of the 1st seagoing computers on board as a pilot program. It took us longer to do the payroll lists on punch cards than if we've just typed them up!

I would have thought that a typewriter artist would be more keyed up about her work! :lol: :coolsmile:

Lineprinter nudes! I worked at a computer graphics engine manufacturer for a while. It didn't take long to figure out how to translate the characters for a lineprinter nude into dots of varying shades of pink, better suited for display on a color terminal. Of course, the picture went from several feet long on paper to almost too small to see on the screen, but hey, it improved my programming skills. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

I'm surprised that you're surprised that typewriter ribbons are still available. I have 3 typewriters, all in excellent working condition, the oldest being a Royal portable I received when I learned to type in 1961. I've never had a problem getting ribbons for any of these, and based on a simple Google search, I never will.

I doubt many will remember punch cards like we had in college for the VAX 370 type systems that ran PLC, Fortran, COBOL, etc ...

Us old "fogies" have been around since the invention of the internet when it was BBS boards on a dial-up modem that allowed one user at a time. Anyone remember PC Pursuit ? It let you connect BBS boards around the country for a set monthly fee via telnet. We used it as teens to download stuff and upload our own hacked software for the Amiga and Atari 400/800 and later the 520/1040ST computers.

I'm pretty sure we had the discussion before on WU about our earliest computer experiences. Someone, I seem to recall, trumped mine, but not by much. I go back, circa 1971 in high school, to a remote teletype and keyboard unit--no monitor whatsoever--communicating with a nearby corporation's DEC machine.

1971 in high school eh ? Paul is really old ... Patty and I were born in 1964... so you win old computer stories buddy .. mea culpa

If we are bragging about how old we are ~~~ My boss in (I think) 1972 bought a pocket calculator [+,-,*,/] for $2xx.00 and bragged about it. About a year later with 2 box tops you could get the "Wise Old Owl" for $5.00

My father worked as a engineer for Bowmar and I have several prototype calculators et al they produced. Texas Instruments sued them and they went into producing military electronic devices and exited the consumer calculator business.

One very important reason for typewriters to still be used these days: any email can be intercepted by the NSA or the KGB. A carbon copy, transferred by a trusted agent in person, can't.