Re: The joy of FORTRAN

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-09-29, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 04:26:09 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
 

On 2024-09-28, Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

I think still does. You wouldn’t want to print too long a name on a
check, for instance, just because your system allows it and some
literal clerk just types in what they see.

 
At a PPOE, my job title was "Programmer-Analyst".  When squashed into
the 15-character field allocated for it in our payroll system, it became

 
With proportional fonts and a decent graphics/typography API, you can
apply nonuniform scaling to the text--reduce the width without reducing
the height. This gives you some leeway to squeeze in a little bit more
text, rather than forcing hard truncation.

 
That may be, but we could never figure out how to get our impact
printers to print a horizontal pitch of anything other than 10
characters per inch.  There was something about the spacing of
the print hammers, timing of the print band, etc.  Laser printers
had just come out, but they still cost a quarter of a million
dollars, and we couldn't squeeze that - or the expansion of the
computer room to hold the beast - into the budget.
 
But that's just me being ANAL again.
 

Laser printers were a real eye-opener. I had the College order an LN03 with
our VAX, and everyone was thrilled when we started printing financial aid
notices for students on it.

--
Pete