Text formatting on a mainframe

Today I recalled that as a student in the 70s I discovered that the line printer attached to the Univac 1108 mainframe at my university's computer centre could print lower case characters. So I modified the Ratfor workalike of the Unix roff program that I had entered into the computer to treat all alphabetic characters as lower case, and implemented escape codes to raise (and lower later) the case for capitalised words and acronyms. This was to be able to use punch cards as input, as the terminals were not always available. I don't remember if I implemented auto-detection of beginning of sentences, probably not. I even typeset my undergraduate thesis this way.

At that time I was using Ratfor as a structured Fortran, having been introduced to it and the book that described it, Software Tools, at a work experience stint, and had not yet encountered Unix in person. It was only when I did my masters that I learnt Unix and C.

I have wondered if the computer operators were surprised by the appearence of lower case printout since everybody else seemed to accept that UPPER CASE was the only case available.

Have you tried turning it (VirtualBox) off and on again?

I had a strange problem where USB devices were detected on the host system (Linux) but did not appear as available devices for a VirtualBox guest (XP). The strange thing was that I could use the devices normally on Linux, but they just didn't appear to the guests, not just XP but also a Debian guest.

I searched high and low for reports of the problem but nobody else seemed to have had it. And it was working before, although I was not sure if there was an intervening Linux kernel upgrade.

Finally in desperation I decided to reboot the system. Lo and behold, after that the devices became available to the guest. My best guess it that somehow the part of VirtualBox handling the USB forwarding got wedged. So give the old The IT Crowd advice a try.

My first and only postcardware

Back in the 90s I wrote a couple of DOS programs that turned a PC, even an ancient model like the XT, into a diskless printer spooler, using the LPR or JetDirect protocols over Ethernet.  It was my attempt to repurpose superannuated PCs for useful work. The PC could even be network booted, thus not requiring even a floppy drive.

Anyway, I released the program as open source postcardware, which is a variant of shareware, where the user is encouraged to send a postcard to the author if they like the program. I got a few postcards, mostly from Europe, in the years that followed. Here are the 4 I found in my old letters. I think I have another from New Caledonia but I haven't found it yet.

Since then I have released open source software under more conventional but less interesting licenses.

A Bonn scene

Same author, also Bonn

Heidelberg in winter

Lisbon, but I think the author was Dutch