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**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · 5d

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**The Grue** @the_grue@digitalcourage.social · 6d

The Grue @the_grue@digitalcourage.social

@yomimono Wow, how many stitches?

My first experience with programming #postscript (30 years ago) was to turn a gif of Edward Barton's "Sanctuary" into a huge cross stitch plan.

128030 stitches... My wife sat 3 years and s7 months at it.

A framed cross stitched artwork of a seaside scene with heavy storm and a wild sea. The original is Edward Barton's "sanctuary".

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · May 4

**INBELLA** @inbella@channels.im · May 3

**Bytes Europe** @byteseu@pubeurope.com · May 3

Continued thread

**Jens Kutílek** @jenskutilek@typo.social · Apr 28

Apr 28

Jens Kutílek @jenskutilek@typo.social

Now I learned that halftone screening is built into #PostScript. You can define a "spot function" that will “specify the order of pixel whitening in an indirect way that minimizes interactions with the screen frequency and angle”. (https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf p. 480)

Consider a halftone cell to have its own coordinate system: the center of the cell is the origin and the corners are at coordinates +1.0 horizontally and vertically. Each pixel in the cell is centered at horizontal and vertical coordinates that both lie in the range - 1.0 to +1.0. For each pixel, the PostScript interpreter pushes the pixel's coordinates on the operand stack and calls the spot function procedure. The procedure must return a single number in the range - 1.0 to +1.0 that defines the pixel's position in the whitening order.

The specific values the spot function returns are not significant; all that matters is the relative values returned for different pixels. As a cell's gray level varies from black to white, the first pixel whitened is the one for which the spot function returns the lowest value, the next pixel is the one with the next higher spot function value, and so on. If two pixels have the same spot function value, their relative order is chosen arbitrarily.

A spot function whose value is inversely related to the distance from the center of he cell produces a "dot screen" in which the black pixels are clustered within a circle whose area is inversely proportional to the gray level. An example of such a spot function is
{ 180 mul cos
exch 180 mul cos
add
2 div
}

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · Apr 27

**Pyrzout** @jos1264@social.skynetcloud.site · Apr 24

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · Apr 20

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · Apr 13

**Su-Shee** @sushee@fosstodon.org · Apr 12

**ITs History!** @gfkDSGN@pixelfed.social · Apr 11

Apr 11

ITs History! @gfkDSGN@pixelfed.social

1982 Commodore introduced the computer for the masses not the classes...
“It writes, rates, creates, even telecommunicates. Costs less does more — the #Commodore64”

This outstanding #homecomputer came with #8bit #MOS6510 #CPU, 64KB RAM and #BASIC. Initially the #C64 was sold for a little under 600 bucks, but competition was brutal in the #8bit-war. https://youtu.be/E9nDsIvUto4

With prices dropping #Commodore sold two million units annually and had a market share up to 40% in the US until 1986.
At one point, the company was selling as many C64s as the rest of the industry combined.

Even when #IBM #PC 5150 compatible #16bit systems changed that in 1988, the #C=64 became highest-selling computer model of all time.

Our #vector #graphic #retrocomputer #art wasn't realized in old #Adobe #PostScript #vectorgraphics #tech with #Ai #Illustrator, but in #svg #technology with #FreeSoftware #Inkscape

vector illustration of a Commodore 64 SBC

#Inkscape

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · Apr 6

**Blake Patterson** @blakespot@oldbytes.space · Apr 5 *

Apr 5 *

Blake Patterson @blakespot@oldbytes.space

Thinking of NEXTSTEP this morning...I'd guess many aren't aware of the unusual color display arrangement.

The NeXTstation, which was the first "affordable" color solution for NEXTSTEP, has a 16-bit framebuffer, but instead of rendering the desktop in 65,536 colors (as per Windows or Mac hardware, say), it rendered in 12-bit color with 4-bits of alpha channel (transparency).

That means it had a palette of 4096 colors, with all colors available at once on the display (not like, say, the Amiga or Apple IIgs with a 4096 color palette, but video modes with a small subset of those colors available (yes, yes, HAM mode excluded). Additionally, anything on the screen had 16 levels of opacity available.

It's interesting to see in person, on the actual hardware (especially on a good LCD display). With dithering, it looks very close to 24-bit truecolor.

(The NeXT Dimension color board for the Cube allowed 24-bit color with 8-bits alpha, but that was not so frequently used -- less so than most NeXT hardware even...)

But that's not nearly the weirdest that NEXTSTEP-capable hardware got, when it came to color video display...

#NeXT #NEXTSTEP #NeXTstation

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · Mar 30

**Michael Piotrowski** @mxp@mastodon.acm.org · Mar 24

Mar 24

Michael Piotrowski @mxp@mastodon.acm.org

I’m about to try and teach #PostScript programming to #DigitalHumanities students.

I used to teach #Inform7 in this course, which they hated. We’ll see how it goes…

**Roger BW** @RogerBW@discordian.social · Mar 23

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**Donald Hobern** @dhobern@scicomm.xyz · Mar 18

Mar 18

Donald Hobern @dhobern@scicomm.xyz

@ics

For me, it was during a lull in my workload at the #IBM Hursley lab in the UK when I worked my way through the O'Reilly #sed & #awk book (the one with the two lorises on the cover).

I'm guessing it was 1995 because my annual birdwatching summary at the start of the next year switched from a fixed column text document to formatting in #Postscript. My first big awk project was to process the underlying data to generate a PS document (something I also learned in the same downtime period).

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