A steam punk VDU ?

If you know Charles Stross's "Laundry" series you'll know that the narrators boss uses a thing called a Memex to store and query information held on micrfiche cards. It's known that Charles Babbage planned to link a printer directly to his Analytical Engine to eliminate typos when …

This topic was created by John Smith 19 .

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    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Am I missing something...

      Yes you are missing something. Those are called split flap displays and have been mentioned multiple times already.

  1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Dot matrix anyone?

    How about a dot matrix display? Small magnetic dots on the "screen" would be controlled from a mechanism behind the screen using rotating magnetic rods arranged in a matrix - when both rods aligned, the screen dot would be toggled to set (white) or unset (black) and would remain in that position until an update arrived. Overall, viewed from the mechanism side, the arrangement would be not dissimilar from core memory but somewhat larger.

  2. Gazman
    Headmaster

    The Tank

    Imagine a tank of opaque fluid fronted by glass (surrounded by gilt frame perhaps).

    The Tank has a reading light over it, aimed at the glass, which you switch on.

    You start to hit the control rods and an image forms on the Tank wall in front of you.

    Thousands of tiny rods pushed through the fluid by lever action, tipped by black rubber, are pushing up against the screen to form an image of a kitten and the mysterious message 'LOL'.

    That is all.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Storage

    I once saw a purely mechanical means of data storage on an automatic assembly machine. It had been designed by a mechanic, not an engineer, and was quite ingenious.

    The mechanical data storage consisted of pins in brass tubes near the periphery of a wheel.The pins could be pushed up or down in the tubes mechanically, and were held in place by a spring and ball mechanism. In this system, each position on the wheel corresponded to a module in the process of assembly. If an assembly station failed,e.g.due to no component at that station, the pin was pushed down, and inhibited further operations at that station (by not pushing an actuator lever as it moved into position). The machinery was pneumatic.

    The VDU backing store could be replicated with 25 of these wheels each with 90 positions 4 degrees apart. Along the radius at each position would be 7 pins, so that an ASCII digit could be spelled out in binary. The writing head would consist of 14 little steam powered cylinders, 7 to push down and 7 to push up, and of course these could be combined into a single 14-cylinder unit for all the ones that lay between two wheels. The read head would consist of tiny steam valves actuated by levers that were operated by the pins as they moved into place. The levers would work on the side of the pin that stuck up above the wheel, thus avoiding the problem of ensuring that read did not destroy a bit state.

    Of course the whole thing would be a bit slow and, if combined with my internal golfball in glass cylinder CRT replacement, a complete screen refresh would probably take around half an hour. But then, I can recall when that was about how long AutoCad took to redraw a screen on a 286, and at the time everybody just accepted it.

    In fact, I can remember when people used to complain that it took about that long to log in to a Windows domain in some large companies. The past is a different country, even when it's familiar stuff.

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Happy

      Re: Storage

      "The mechanical data storage consisted of pins in brass tubes near the periphery of a wheel.The pins could be pushed up or down in the tubes mechanically, and were held in place by a spring and ball mechanism. In this system, each position on the wheel corresponded to a module in the process of assembly. If an assembly station failed,e.g.due to no component at that station, the pin was pushed down, and inhibited further operations at that station (by not pushing an actuator lever as it moved into position). The machinery was pneumatic."

      OK I think I get roughly what you're talking about. 25 wheels for a line with 7 or 8 bit at each location (IE A row) and 90 locations IE 90 lines, to simplify the indexing problem. With even fairly loose tolerances (say 3-6 thou) this could still be made quite compact.

      Note that the classic way to handle this would be a servo valve arrangement that has a sensitive detector (to sense the pin out or in) releasing fluid which then drives a 2nd more powerful valve.

      That said a sufficiently sensitive system could probably get away with a single level sense/actuate approach..

      It sounds like an adjustable version of the pins in a musical box.

      As I noted above pneumatics and hydraulics are fine for this.

      Any ideas for what the display would be?

      1. Retired Spy

        Re: Storage (Pin Braille Type Display)

        This sounds very much like a braille output device. They are mounted horizontally, typically only display a single or small number of lines, are driven via electricity and output in braille. I love the idea tho'. Now if I were to try to build one...

        (1) 80x24 character pinboard of 7 segment displays (each segment is a hex pin as shown in the current wikipedia entry),

        (2) Pins are set in a plate, plate has cams at corners (and centre), cams push plate back to reset pins, retracting the pins below the "screen" surface, clearing the display,

        (3) A carriage traverses the the display one character at a time, pushing pins out towards the user,

        (4) The carriage carries a set of dies, each of which will push a select group of (7-segment) pins,

        (5) The carriage is positioned so the pusher die of the selected symbol is aligned behind the next character cell,

        (6) An actuator (pneumatic would have the best sound I think) pushes the pinsetter forward which shoves some of the pins forward, out through a perforated "screen",

        (7) A light shining from the side highlights the set pins so you see the letterforms in the contrast between the pins and their shadows,

        (8) For cool factor, Y positioning could be done by moving the screen itself vertically up one line as the carriage slides back to the left. So clearing the screen would included dropping it down so the top line of the screen would be printed first.

        To drive it, you would need to select a symbol (1 to N, N <= 128) and a horizontal position (1-80). If you process one line at a time, reaching the end of the line would trigger the carriage to return to the first character position of the next line (sound familiar?). This could be done by having the carriage slide along two shafts. One rotates to select the character position (X position), the second shaft rotates to select the character. I would use a sliding tube for the pneumatic actuator (shiny brass like a trombone).

        If the die selector was a wheel (daisy wheel printer), you could use modular arithmetic, so the symbol selector shaft would only ever have to rotate in one direction.

        You would have to engineer the whole thing to be self-aligning, which is straight forward, but requires some thought. With high strength materials and adequate power a evolved design might get up to 7 or even 10 cps. If you used a ballistic pin driver, you could probably go much faster, tho' at some point you would run into serious material (elastic rebound, wear, jamming, etc) problems since you are pushing serious mass (pins) as opposed to ink.

        The attached keyboard would be pretty cool too. People would probably pay you just be able to type and see their output appear on the display...

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  5. harmjschoonhoven
    Angel

    Machina Cryptologica

    Ah, a steampunk VDU. That is the Machina Cryptologica of Athanasius Kircher S.J., described in his book Magnes, sive arte magnetica (The Magnet or the Magnetic Art), Cologne 1643.

    See "Athanasius Kircher, The Last Man Who Knew Everything" by Paula Findlen (ed.), Figure 11.1.

  6. harmjschoonhoven
    Happy

    Re: Machina Cryptologica

    For an illustation of the device go to

    http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/218-25-quod-1/start.htm?image=00425

  7. Long John Brass

    What about a miniature version of this?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. Chromatix

    A mechanical seven- or sixteen-segment display is feasible. Here's an electromechanical type which was used nationally as railway clocks for a while: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djcaR1tVdVg While this example (designed for numbers only) is merely seven-segmented, a sixteen-segment version could display letters quite competently.

    The obvious way to drive one without electricity is with pneumatics. You would need to build some fluidic logic to store a six-bit character code, and then decode it to drive the individual segments. It doesn't matter if the decoder is a bit slow, since you only need to latch the code into the storage before you can move on to the next display position.

    Input on the bottom row could be done by mechanically actuating the storage valves with a sliding camshaft. Slide the cams under the position to be updated, then rotate the appropriate ones to "set" or "reset" the bits required. A separate "group reset" lever could be arranged to zero the storage registers in the entire row.

    Additional rows above could be driven from the bottom row, and filled by scrolling. A tradeoff could be made here by sending the decoded signal up for latching directly, rather than duplicating the decoders.

  10. yorksranter

    Imagine a flat belt like a conveyor belt, made of an impermeable material. Below it, we have a tank of oil or similar fluid. As the belt travels around its loop, it dips into the fluid, so the top surface of the belt is always covered by a fresh film of oil. Better, the belt passes through a set of brushes that are trickle-lubricated, providing the same effect less messily and with less weight.

    We then have a head that can be moved in two axes - i.e across the belt and along it - within a defined rectangle. This rectangle is one video frame. The head makes a mark in the film of oil with a very sharp tool (like those pen nibs mentioned earlier). As the belt moves on, the frame of graphics is illuminated. The untouched oily surface is reflective, the marks darker. A mirror placed above this section of the belt, angled at 45 degrees, reflects the image onto a screen.

    The image is then plunged back into the oil bath/dragged through the brushes and therefore erased. The frame rate is critical. It shouldn't be a problem to drive the belt at the movies' 24 fps, because the drive is basically a big film projector (actually, not necessarily a very big one - if the head is small and precise enough we can magnify the frame optically).

    Making the write head keep up is hard. This could be tackled in a couple of ways. One would be to segment the frame into subframes drawn by multiple heads, with genuinely steampunky weight and complexity.

    Another way would be to ditch the vector graphic approach in favour of bitmap, which only needs one axis of control. If you did it that way, you could also have multiple pins on the head, making it a dot matrix print head and therefore making it possible to output characters as such rather than drawing them as graphics.

    A machine that lowers a needle onto a passing sheet of flexible material, precisely, really fast would not be at all alien to the Victorians because it's basically a sewing machine or, scaled up, a power loom. This solution is basically a hybrid of textile and cinema technology, so all you need are the Lumiere brothers to walk into the right pub in Leeds in 1895 and talk to some loom engineers;-0.

    The encoding would be basically x-distance, pin number, binary up/down, as the speed of the belt provides the y-distance. You might even be able to map it into Baudot and push it down a telegraph wire or over a wireless telegraph. Alternatively, and probably more robust, imagine the line across the belt as a packet containing a fixed number of sequential pixels that can contain up/down commands, with blanks padded. Now you have the potential of telegraphing into the central loom from a branch office.

    (note to SF writers: the sysadmins on this are going to be scarily tough women from Halifax.)

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Happy

      @yorksranter

      Neat. You have roughly described an opt/mechanical eidiphor projection TV system.

      Plausible but getting the oil viscosity just right (and either limiting its changes with temperature or temperature compensating the system) will be tricky. Neatly you've got the "display" and the "memory" components combined.

      A very steam punk solution.

      "(note to SF writers: the sysadmins on this are going to be scarily tough women from Halifax.)"

      Yes, I've seen how fit the women in textile factories tend to be. The phrase "fighting for your man" takes on a whole new meaning :) .

      1. yorksranter

        Re: @yorksranter

        I sort-of remembered that Doug Engelbart's 1968 NLS demo used a projection system borrowed from NASA involving a surface coated with oil and an electron beam.

        I actually think vibration might be an even worse problem than temperature.

        1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
          Happy

          Re: @yorksranter

          "I sort-of remembered that Doug Engelbart's 1968 NLS demo used a projection system borrowed from NASA involving a surface coated with oil and an electron beam."

          That would be an Eidiphor.

          "I actually think vibration might be an even worse problem than temperature."

          You could be right. Temperature control is small enclosure is pretty well understood. Obviously the wider the range you need to keep it in the easier, but I'd say a couple of degrees would not be too tough. When you want 1/100 of a C then things get tricky.

          Vibration on the other hand, Not so easy.

  11. Spoonsinger

    Sorry the whole 'do something in a "Steam punk" way' is just silly.

    a) Victorians, (as previously mentioned), had electricity.

    b) Steam punk doesn't preclude the use of electricity, and if it does and isn't using 'magic', (maybe something like Space 1889), it just changes the laws of physics anyway.

    c) Just use a large pin art board with appropriate mechanics if you want to go the whole 'not quite Steam Punk VDU route) - maybe just call it Georgian Punk, (but then they knew about electricity as well - but still burnt witches, so will slot in with the whole fanaticism thing).

    1. Cliff

      Re: Sorry the whole 'do something in a "Steam punk" way' is just silly.

      I think it's more of a fun thought experiment with loose boundaries than precise historical re-enactment

      1. Spoonsinger

        Re: Sorry the whole 'do something in a "Steam punk" way' is just silly.

        Point taken, (with added plus), however if it's a 'thought experiment', (i.e. just going a mechanical way), why bring in the whole Steam Punk thing? Steam Punk tends to be Victoriana + magic or Victoriana with wayward physics. If you just want a mechanical solution 'thought experiment', there isn't really a problem - other than the size of the thing you build.

        1. Cliff

          Re: Sorry the whole 'do something in a "Steam punk" way' is just silly.

          Fair point, and +1 to you too. Guess it's a bit of a shorthand for dark wood and mechanical ingenuity. Although it's also a shortcut for sticking fake cogs and brasswork on a fucking iPhone, so not a very useful shortcut...

          1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
            Happy

            @Spoonsinger & Cliff

            As I pointed out up thread

            In the spirit of El Reg headlines the story doesn't really have that much to do with "Steam Punk"

            In fact, hardly anything.

            Which is also in the spirit of El Reg headlines.

            If you read up thread you'd have seen one of my motivations was the idea of a "post WWIII" computer system. One that would not be fried by EMP at any range, because it simply did not use electricity to begin with.

            How does that basis work for you?

  12. yorksranter

    Actually, add more complexity: we need a shutter and a projector-like step drive.

  13. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    In the tradition of El Reg headlines the title did not *quite* mean what the story said.

    If you'd read my OP you'd know that idea was to try something resembling Vanavar Bush's "Memex" first described in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. Well after electricity suppliers were available, but primarily opto-mechanical. Bush's team were quite interested in closed tank liquid processing for microfilm data storage and "dry" film processing (later developed by a different team for the 1960's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission).

    The real driver was to do it without electricity. I did not expect any trouble with a keyboard but the display/memory was always going to be the long pole in the tent.

    The full origins for this idea (for anyone interested) were:-

    Charles Stross's "Laundry" series and the description of a Memex in that.

    The UL that DARPA had developed a mechanical computer as part of the contingency planning for WWIII

    Sterling & Gibson's "The Difference Engine" and how a society could be run with punch cards, printers and mechanical computers.

    The work on fluidic computers for backup flight control on relaxed static stability aircraft.

    Gordon Dickson's "Dorsai" trilogy and the idea that in a world of starships, nuclear weapons and (IIRC) suppressor field ground combat had reverted to "spring guns" (no combustion) and close range signalling to whistle codes (EMP can cook any radio system).

    S&G describe essentially a 1950's IT environment. I wondered if you could drag it into the 1960's or 70's.

    As always the joker in the pack is not the logic devices, the display or the program storage, it's the RAM.

    So far the answer is looking like "yes."

  14. Jerky Jerk face

    Use an array of steel pins to create the display, like the old timey "Pin Art" desk toy from the 70s80s?

    Brought to life recently by the latest Superman movie and also featured in The Tom Cruise Sci Fi movie oblivion.

    Would 'look' right at home as part of steam punk take

  15. Gavin McMenemy

    I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this but...

    I find it ironic that the memex has been mentioned in an thread about steampunk given Charlie's well documented disdain for the "genre".

  16. srimech

    Ball bearing dot matrix

    I prefer the flip-display solution, but here's another alternative. Metal grids are quite cheaply available and if laid flat, ball bearings will stay in the hole they're placed upon. A ball bearing can block light, or alternatively, glass marbles could be used which can focus light to a display or refract it in other ways.

    The advantage would be that the grid and the ball bearings are cheap stock components, so you wouldn't have to manufacture each bit. You would have to make the device for pushing ball bearings (and reading their position if you want to read out) but that would hopefully only be made once per word, column or so on.

    I'd imagine you would not add or remove ball bearings from the grid, but just shunt one bearing between a '0' row and an '1' row per bit, with the 0 row not being visible to the user.

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Happy

      Re: Ball bearing dot matrix

      "I'd imagine you would not add or remove ball bearings from the grid, but just shunt one bearing between a '0' row and an '1' row per bit, with the 0 row not being visible to the user."

      I sort of get your idea. The problem then becomes implementing some kind of X, Y mechanism so at the intersection a ball gets moved. Cycling through the X and Y ranges should be (relatively) straight forward.

  17. Chozo

    IF electricity==true

    How far down rabbit hole of technological possabilities would be acceptable to the Steam Punk community?

    Relay logic is a sure bet but what about Thermionics?

    Check out the work of H.P FriedRichs, he builds his own valves & transistors.

    http://hpfriedrichs.com/mybooks/ioa/bks-ioa-gallery2.htm

    Funnily enough there's a lot of work being on done today at the microscopic level with folk etching tiny triodes in silicon wafers so in a steam punk universe the same technique could exist just applied at a larger scale.

    As for the display itself this demo for a DIY LED is pretty crude but its got potential.

    http://makezine.com/2009/04/14/lost-knowledge-homemade-electronic/

    PS: very impressed with my new Röntgen Ray wireless telegraph, excellent reception even through walls.

    1. Chromatix

      Re: IF electricity==true

      I think there are two reasonable technological cutoff points for including electricity in a steampunk aesthetic:

      Liberal: semiconductors are not allowed. Simply assume that the PN junction does not work, thereby disabling the LED, the silicon rectifier, transistors of all kinds, and the microchip (as we know it, anyway).

      Conservative: not only do semiconductors not work, but neither do thermionics. The thermionic valve (or "vacuum tube" for Yanks) was invented in the early part of the 20th century; although cold-cathode effects were known for some time before then, it was difficult to find uses for them.

      Note that even the "conservative" definition still permits "vacuum tube like" technologies which actually rely on striking an arc in a gas medium, eg. the mercury-arc rectifier, the Dekatron and the Nixie tube.

    2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Unhappy

      IF electricity==true

      That's pretty much the only ground rule.

      It's not.

      If it helps think of this as re-booting civilization.

      For those wanting to go "home brew" semiconductors you'd have to go far to exceed the thin film and thick film transistors of various Sci Am contributors in "The Amateur Scientist" column back in the 60's and 70's.

  18. Munchausen's proxy
    Pint

    Linotype

    Have we already forgotten this mechanical wonder of information dissemination?

    1. yorksranter

      Re: Linotype

      My top three sources for this were photography/cinematography, textiles, and printing:-)

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Happy

        @yoursranter

        "My top three sources for this were photography/cinematography, textiles, and printing:-)"

        If you were aware of Eidiphor I'd have expected you to draw the comparison yourself.

        Don't worry about it. I'm just a mine of odd bits and bobs of engineering knowledge and link things together.

  19. Isn't it obvious?

    I actually thought about this years ago...

    ..and the cutest idea I came up with was to use an array of typeballs (from old IBM Selectrics), each behind a mask, plus mirrors and lenses to enlarge the image of the "current" character into a display element. If you're very clever with the optics, you could use different light paths for various typeballs so you could position some typeballs behind others to compress the vertical and horizontal size of the display.

    The Selectrics were entirely mechanical, and you could use any motive source to drive the main shaft (which positioned the head). It even encoded characters in binary, which would simplify using the inputs elsewhere.

    Moving the current (writing) address from character position to position is a problem I didn't dig too far into, but you can at least read back the state of each character from the current set of positioning bits.

  20. Old Handle

    I see the name linotype already came up, but I'm imagining some a bit like that in that the letters would be loose tiles that the machine would physically arrange to display text. This would allow insertion, replacement and deletion as (relatively) simply mechanical operations. The tiles would have unique notches or teeth on the back, allowing the machine to read the text, and also sort the tiles back into the correct trays when they were deleted from the display.

    1. Mike 16

      Re: Linotype

      "The tiles would have unique notches or teeth on the back, allowing the machine to read the text, and also sort the tiles back into the correct trays when they were deleted from the display."

      Linotype matrices already have coded notches (albeit on the top) for precisely the purpose of sorting the them back into the magazine. 19th century tech FTW.

      I agree that combining display with storage is a big win. As our host has mentioned, the hard part is the RAM. On that note, if anyone can help me find info on a keyboard driven Morse Keyer with FIFO buffer (to smooth out sending speed), purely mechanical, I'd appreciate it.

      Please, no pointers to the punched-tape systems or machines implemented with PICs or PCs, or even the rash of surplus-electronics versions in the 1960s. This thing was briefly mentioned in QST in the 1960s or so, and seemed to have implemented the FIFO in some sort of drum, probably like a re-writeable pin-drum (ala music box). Very 1890s, or 1920s at the latest.

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge

        Re: Linotype

        "On that note, if anyone can help me find info on a keyboard driven Morse Keyer with FIFO buffer (to smooth out sending speed), purely mechanical, I'd appreciate it."

        "This thing was briefly mentioned in QST in the 1960s or so, and seemed to have implemented the FIFO in some sort of drum, probably like a re-writeable pin-drum (ala music box)."

        Weird.

        The "drum with pins" calls to mind a controller for complex chemical synthesis I saw in an old Sci Am for the "Merrifield Technique." Essentially an uncommitted cam timer where you set the speed of the drum rotation and programmed it by inserting or removing "plugs" at each location on each control channel, each segment along the drum being a channel.

        But doing it mechanically? If the input is Morse it could be using a solenoid to pull or push the pins in or out of the drum. How much store? If the storage is substantial a spiral pattern round the drum would make more sense.

        You say a keyboard, do you mean the keyboard writes to the drum in a code like ASCII (or more appropriately Baudot)?

        1. Mike 16

          Re: Linotype

          Actually about the Morse keyboard sender.

          ----------------

          The "drum with pins" calls to mind a controller for complex chemical synthesis I saw in an old Sci Am for the "Merrifield Technique." Essentially an uncommitted cam timer where you set the speed of the drum rotation and programmed it by inserting or removing "plugs" at each location on each control channel, each segment along the drum being a channel.

          -------------

          Sort of the extension into three dimensions of certain light-timers. You place "on" and "off" pegs wherever you want on a disk which is truned by a clock motor. Maybe I should say "4 dimensions", as your device allowed variable speed.

          --------------

          But doing it mechanically? If the input is Morse it could be using a solenoid to pull or push the pins in or out of the drum. How much store? If the storage is substantial a spiral pattern round the drum would make more sense.

          -------------

          No solenoids. No electricity at all, far as I could tell, other than that switched by the output contacts. I don't think it had an electric motor either. Appeared to be clockwork, although I suppose a large office could be run off a line-shaft with belts. :-)

          As far as I could tell, the keyboard pushed a code into a row of bistable pins, then advanced the drum to the next row. Meanwhile, a "reader" of some sort walked around the drum, reading and clearing rows. From the (dim and dimly remmbered at this point) photo, there appeared to be maybe 50 rows of 7-10 (a guess, see below) pins, or maybe invertable springs, or wire-memory like used by Zuse used in Z-1 and Z-2.

          ---------------

          You say a keyboard, do you mean the keyboard writes to the drum in a code like ASCII (or more appropriately Baudot)?

          -------------

          More likely a native representation of Morse. I know of three possibilities. the first is like some tape machines used, punching "on" and "off" holes and advancing a variable number of spaces depending on character length. This makes the reader/sender easy, but complicates the keyboard/punch. Another is to use 10 bits per character. The send-head close the keyer for each "mark" pin, then clears the pin. It stops when it has no more mark pins. The last (which I tend to use in Morse-sending code) is to send a dit for a zero and a dah for a one, except for the last bit, which is ignored, but allows 1000 (read right to left) to be ... (S) and 1111 to be --- (O), etc. There is a little more complexity in the read/send head, but you can store all common characters and digraphs to fit in 7 or 8 bits (pins), for more flexibility and fewer fiddly pins.

          How's that for a digression? To further digress, in the same time-frame as that article, were usually advertisements foe Frederick Electronics, touting their Morse<->Baudot gateways. Electronic, but fascinating.

  21. suranyami

    It already exists: a linotype machine

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine

    These have been in use in the printing industry to compose a "line of type" at a time, which forms a complete block of text. Editing of the last line was made possible by being able to reject a whole line and start again.

    Although intended for hot metal printing, it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to see this used as a display medium and with some kind of binary encoding physically embedded on the individual character blocks for it to work as digital input medium.

    Later systems in the 1960s used similar techniques but with Microfiche, which would also be an avenue for developing projection displays.

  22. Alan Bourke

    Something like the Entex Adventure Vision / Nintendo Virtual Boy?

    A spinning mirror and a vertical line of LEDs (or bulbs) producing this?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4gNP74tqsI

    Or Logie Baird's 'Televisor' ?

  23. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    You need to be thinking *phototypesetter,* not Linotype if you want to go that way.

    Linotype machines are not desk sized.

    What you've missed about Linotype m/cs is they cope with unlimited copies by casting lead copies of the raw font forms.

    Consider the proverbial 24 * 80 display.

    That's 1920 copies of any character to cover all the possibilities.

    1. Mike 16

      Re: You need to be thinking *phototypesetter,* not Linotype if you want to go that way.

      > Linotype machines are not desk sized.

      You clearly have never seen some of the desks on Mahogany Row. Besides, a good bit of the bulk is the melting pot and casting operation. Not to mention the expanding spaces. I think we can do without full justification.

      > What you've missed about Linotype m/cs is they cope with unlimited copies by casting lead copies of the raw font forms.

      Didn't actually miss that. Met my first Linotype in 1958 or so. Picked up a fresh slug. Anyway, my point ws that the basic ideas behind coded slugs and automated sorting would provide a way of storing the characters in a way that could be read back. Useful for operations like "delete character". I'm not sure how you propose to implement sceen-edit with a phototypsetter. Not to mention how you plan to develop each frame (Although there was a Vctorian-era camera with built-in developer. Sort of like a proto-Polaroid).

      > Consider the proverbial 24 * 80 display.

      My first non-printing display was more like 12x72, or even 8x40, but agreed, the matrix (or character) magazines would need to be large. OTOH:

      > That's 1920 copies of any character to cover all the possibilities.

      Well, a screen ful of AAAAAA would be a bit boring. and I suspect that the 48 characters typical of early (pre 1960 or so) Data Processing equipment would do for a character set. BTW: I've seen older books which substituted characters, possibly when the supply of, e.g. 'Q' ran out while setting a page. Not to mention the common use of lower-case l for numeral one, and occasionally upper-case O for numeral zero.Humans are adaptable.

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Happy

        Re: You need to be thinking *phototypesetter,* not Linotype if you want to go that way.

        "You clearly have never seen some of the desks on Mahogany Row."

        True.

        Besides, a good bit of the bulk is the melting pot and casting operation. Not to mention the expanding spaces. I think we can do without full justification."

        Also true, but how are you going to produce the multiple copies of a letter?

        " I'm not sure how you propose to implement sceen-edit with a phototypsetter. Not to mention how you plan to develop each frame "

        In my OP I limited it to last line editing.

        "Not to mention how you plan to develop each frame "

        While I'd like to have seen more use of a photographic approach the challenge is tough enough (I think) that no solution should be ruled out unless it's very cumbersome. The trouble was always going to be building an erasable photographic film. That said the USAFRL did work in the mid 90s with bacterial rhodopsin in PVA using 2 color write (1 in the IR) and the IR frequency to erase. Their achieved resolution was 1400 line pairs/mm so a quite small piece could have served.

        "Well, a screen ful of AAAAAA would be a bit boring. and I suspect that the 48 characters typical of early (pre 1960 or so) Data Processing equipment would do for a character set."

        True but worst case planning is that. I chose 24 x 80 because a lot of TTY programs seemed to go with that by default. Regarding a character code well Baudot, used for teletype/telex systems would be more authentic.

        1. Mike 16

          Re: You need to be thinking *phototypesetter,* not Linotype if you want to go that way.

          > how are you going to produce the multiple copies of a letter?

          The letters are exactly analogous to the matrices of a Linotype. If you need 1920 As, then sop be it. Makes the type-magazine pretty large, but it is in the class of problems which can be solved by throwing money at them.

          As opposed to the class of "We have no idea how to do this, even if we had billions at our disposal.

          You just know that this thing is going to be so expensive that it will be installed in the managing director's office, where he will use it to train his philodendron, rather than actually having to work very often.

          > While I'd like to have seen more use of a photographic approach the challenge is tough enough (I think) that no solution should be ruled out unless it's very cumbersome.

          Well, quite a few photographic solutions, especially of the Victorian era are "ruled out" by modern health and safety laws. A friend has been trying to create less toxic (i.e. legal for normal people to use) equivalents to older photographic processes, and had some tales to tell. OTOH, I spent enough time playing bare-handed with mercury as a child that I should be mad as a hatter by now. Oh, wait...

          > Regarding a character code well Baudot, used for teletype/telex systems would be more authentic.

          Baudot was a Johnny come lately in telegraphy (not to mention that what we know as Baudot is actually Murray's later version), pre-dated by at least Morse and Cooke/Wheatstone multi-needle codes. I'm mentally trying to come up with something buildable in Babbage's lifetime, thus from bits and pieces that existed then. Morse makes the cut. Baudot not.

          I'm beginning to think that a "practical" machine would benefit from your notion of phototypesetter, where only one master copy of each glyph is present, but with a pin-screen to store the image.

          Of course, one of my favorite notions would stuff clear or opaque marbles (small as possible) into the bottom of a frame with translucent front and back, and perhaps an optically dense fluid. As each row of these "pixels" is "rendered", it is shoved up in the frame, with older lines emerging from the top. If the opaque "marble" were iron, the two types could be sorted magnetically. for reuse Of course, even a 24x80 screen of 5x7 (in a 6x8 cell) characters would need 92160 of each (actually fewer of the clear ones, unless we do inverse video) .

          Still about the same as the 1920x48 "type matrices" for my Linotype-style machine, but cheaper in bulk, and you could do graphics. can one render a convincing LOL-Cat in 480x192?

          1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
            Happy

            Re: You need to be thinking *phototypesetter,* not Linotype if you want to go that way.

            "You just know that this thing is going to be so expensive that it will be installed in the managing director's office, where he will use it to train his philodendron, rather than actually having to work very often."

            Actually I'm thinking more around a typewriter by 1890. A common (if expensive) piece of "office equipment."

            "Baudot was a Johnny come lately in telegraphy (not to mention that what we know as Baudot is actually Murray's later version),"

            That's tougher. My real core requirement was "No electricity."

            "I'm beginning to think that a "practical" machine would benefit from your notion of phototypesetter, where only one master copy of each glyph is present, but with a pin-screen to store the image."

            Possible. A spinning (or 2 in parallel for upper and lower case) with glyphs that could be pushed out would work provided you can work out how to push the individual glyph into the back of the pin board and index it to the next location.

            "Of course, one of my favorite notions would stuff clear or opaque marbles (small as possible) into the bottom of a frame with translucent front and back, and perhaps an optically dense fluid. As each row of these "pixels" is "rendered", it is shoved up in the frame, with older lines emerging from the top. If the opaque "marble" were iron, the two types could be sorted magnetically. for reuse Of course, even a 24x80 screen of 5x7 (in a 6x8 cell) characters would need 92160 of each (actually fewer of the clear ones, unless we do inverse video) ."

            Not quite sure I get you but the idea of (micro) sized beads, 1/2 black, 1/2 white is actually the core of some eInk displays IIRC from 3M. The correct term is "Electrophoretic."

            eInk breaks the "No electricity" rule, but magneto optic (in the loose sense of the term) would be OK.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. displays

    A more high tech variant is a beast I call a "PEL" Programmable EL".

    Its based on a combination of copper sulphide memristors and electroluminescent sheet where each EL element has a copper sulphide memristor behind it.

    By changing it from high to low resistance the brightness of each pixel will change allowing for storage.

    Have built the separate parts and connected them, it does work but the finicky part is making the board as to get a pure CuS layer requires precise processing and the EL paint is water based...

    The advantage is multiple colours if SrS:Eu or a variant is used as a phosphor and non volatility.

    Once programmed it can be used as a custom display for magazines etc as the layers are somewhat flexible.

    1. andre 2

      Re: Re. displays

      http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm

      This guy is a genius, I learned about this effect from him and he was the one who originally suggested hooking up a memristor to an EL panel as a brightness control.

  25. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Meh

    The *only* absolute rule is *no* electricity

    BTW the idea of an EL with a memory device (or more accurately a layer) was discussed in a big book on photoconductivity I cam across some years ago.

    The system used (IIRC) an EL panel backed by some kind of Ferroelectric storage device.

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