Does the text output of your Fortran code look dull?

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

Does the text output of your Fortran code look dull? Cheaply increase the value of your software and attract new users by restyling with these newfangled graphics primitives.

As seen on this Stanford CS Technical Report published in 1978.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/stanford/Stanford_CS_TR_Collection_2025-12-12/PDF/1978/CS-TR-78-663.pdf

#fortran #graphics #retrocomputing

[hisdeedsaredust@mastodon.online]

@amoroso That scan is really messed up — it looks like a ransom note!

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@hisdeedsaredust LOL indeed.

[arclight@oldbytes.space]

@amoroso Nice mention of SNOBOL for text processing on page 10 :)

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@arclight After all there wasn't much else for text processing back then.

[weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz]

@amoroso @arclight

I recently looked at some pre-web scraping tool I wrote in Lisp in 1986, to extract real-time weather data.

It was... complicated.

I thought, "Sheesh. Coupla regexps & we coulda been outta here in 10 minutes, tops."

Sheepishness at your past efforts is a sign of progress.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@weekend_editor What kind of servers did your tool get the data from?

@arclight

[weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz]

@amoroso @arclight

Somebody at MIT had bought a device the size of a calculator that, for a subscription fee, got weather info via radio. Of course they put it on the MIT network, and so of course I scraped it over at Symbolics.

That turned into the "weather hack", which displayed temperature, wind speed, etc. in the wholine of the lispm screen.

And then I wrote the world's silliest expert system in Joshua to *predict* weather (Cambridge only, 15 mins into the future only). It used historical weather data that I'd stored in a Statice database (also on lispm). So it was an example of hooking an expert system up to a database, using some math code (least squares fits to temperature/barometric pressure over time, for example), and logical reasoning all in one application.

See starting at about 10:45 in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPwQuxjgQo&t=4s

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@weekend_editor It made for a nice Joshua/Statice demo.

@arclight