RE: Beehives...

[Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>]

>As of 1986 Pete was still using his Infoton. he used it til the suns came 
>in. We all knew better than pete, that black letters on white background 
>would never last :-)

We just refused to switch to that new-fangled technology until it was
perfected.  (:-)

I didn't like the fact that you could still see black lines between the
scan lines creating the white background on the Infotons.

Some of you remember the laser printer that Pete and his students built
from a Xerox telecopier that virtually stopped time-sharing on EE's 11/70
so that it could become a device controller whenever anybody printed
something.  (It wasn't completed until after my time.)

Matthew Carter (famous font designer; co-founder of Bitstream) gave a talk
about how we use ugly fonts that are designed to work with the first,
primitive generation of any new technology (phototypesetters, impact
printers, laser printers, workstations, etc.), but we go back to classic
font designs from the early days of printing as soon as that technology
gets good enough to do so.  (He also didn't seem to think much of having to
design smiley faces for DOS fonts.)

As for ugly fonts, I think that the 11/50's 132-column Centronics dot
matrix printer shook the butcher-block lab table when it did a carriage
return, and the table had to be moved so that it wouldn't bang into the RP03s.

I remember when one of the F/S guys called Delta and asked to borrow our
scratch (or diagnostic?) pack so that he could finish something he was
doing at DuPont.  Someone (him?) left theirs sitting on top of an RP02,
which shook a lot more than an RP03, and it eventually walked across the
top of the drive and slid off and crashed onto the floor.

- Aron