The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by John Houghton:

John C. Bunnell - SGML is perhaps the proto-indo-european of that style of markup language.
Madeleine - to him a font was probably a face in one size. A numbercruncher was a mechanical device for sequencial numbering sheets in a letterpress. I could lead you on a merry chase.
Damien - that game was like the game of finding my name on a piano keyboard (many rests, one G). Jump and Open a file named "hn Houghton". Even inserting escapes wherever you want doesn't make it much more interesting.

Oops.
I forgot an apostrophe.
I also forgot to mention TECO. The text editor that worked mostly character-by-character.
TECO BLOG.TXT
3l32ci'$ex$$
[Go down past the third linefeed then 32 characters in. Insert the string "'". Exit, yanking pages and writing the buffer as you go.]

I set type by hand in a shop class in Jr. HS, back in the mid-60s. Later on I was with my father on a trip in Maine, and got to see a linotype in action, and he caught the hot slugs with our names on them with a folded newspaper, to spoil the operators fun. Around the same time I took a boy scout trip to the Boston Globe plant, and saw them layout a page of linotype, make an impression with fancy paperpulp, roll that up inside a drum, and cast an impression drum for the printing press from hot metal.
In the mid-70s working for Digital, I supported some of the in-house typesetting folks on their PDP-11 based system. The coolest computer terminal I ever worked with was the typesetting version of the VT20, a sleek fiberglass case with a deepset screen, and the function keys on the side of the keyboard were individually backlit with little incandescent lights, under program control. It was pretty easy to make a simple assembler program for light shows. It probably used a variant of runoff for typesetting (my memory fades, grasshopper), and the justification-and-hyphenation process was a batch job that would be left to run overnight for about a brochure's worth of text. It then went to some version of a formed-character optical system for output. I also worked on some interface code for an early xerographic printer. Pre-laser printer technology. It was a variant of a Computer Original Microfilm printer with a CRT as the imaging device, and since memory was still to slow or expensive to do it dot-by-dot for 132x60 pages, the characters were on a shadow mask near the neck of the CRT, and a fuzzy electon-beam was deflected though the appropriate character, and then deflected to the apropriate position.
A year or so later, DEC and Xerox collaborated on a laser printer. Then they shrunk. Then shrunk more. You could even eventually put one in an office, if you had a dedicated 20amp outlet.
Then early inkjets that were messy when they broke.
Software - runoff (basic formatting), Scribe (text as objects, you labeled something as a footnote, and decided whether you wanted footnotes or endnotes when you ran Scribe on your formatted text), then TeX, MetaFont, LaTeX, WordPerfect, AmiPro - the whole electronic Tower of Babble.
Uphill. Both ways.

[Xopher] On a completely unrelated note, have you read any Donaldson lately?
Not in years. He did teach me about figuring out words from their roots or even their feel, since so many weren't in ANY of my dictionaries. I did get through his Thomas Convenant the Unbelievably Depressed. Has he learned to write in any other scale than B Downer Minor?

"I'm sorry..." I think they overclaim what they can do, and it looks like it will lead to mild Thesauritosis, but I know people that this might help with simple writing problems (ESL, forex). It certainly won't upgrade your skills unless you're really bad with adjectives and adverbs. I shudder to think of people applying it to fiction.
Mostly they're just blowing [white] smoke up your butt.

Ah, Skwid, what a sad life you have had, if nobody ever let you look at their Pogo comics by Walt Kelly.
Funny, satirical, political, punnical, topical, anthropomorphical animal comic strip from the 40s to the mid-70s. And nonsensical new words to old songs, bits of which have been confusing you in entries above. A quick look at my online library union catalog was quite fruitful, and I now have ILL requests for some cool memories.
"We have met the enemy and he is us."

Xopher: The Godspell lyric is:
On the willows there,
we hung up our lives,
for our captors there required ...
From the Godspell vocal score I just happen to have.

I don't mean to harp, or call you a lyre, just nitpicking to be polite.

Comment statistics for John Houghton on the Making Light blog

Total: 7 comments. View all these comments on a single page.