Where has the practice of sending screen shots as source code come from?

Peter Pearson pkpearson at nowhere.invalid
Tue Jan 30 13:31:31 EST 2018


On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 14:46:59 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On 29 Jan 2018 17:26:32 GMT, Peter Pearson <pkpearson at nowhere.invalid>
> declaimed the following:
>
>>
>>In 1964, the IBM exhibit at the World's Fair in New York demonstrated
>>a system that read dates that visitors wrote by hand.  (You were
>>supposed to write your date of birth, and the system then printed
>>the New York Times's headline for that date.)
>
> 	Was it somehow scanning dates from paper or cards, or was it using some
> sort of touch sensor input (pressure tablet, or a pen in a harness with
> position sensors).
>
> 	The first would be OCR proper, while the second is what many PDAs (and
> some tablets) rely upon. The second provides actually stroke vector
> information on how the characters are formed, which is more reliable than
> just seeing pixel transitions and trying to match characters to them.

We wrote our dates of birth on paper or punch cards (I forget which)
with an ordinary pen.  We handed the papers (or cards) to someone who
fed them into a machine, which printed slips of paper that were handed
to us as we exited.  According to the promotional displays, our writing
was examined optically; one poster showed a scan path that resembled
an extremely prolate cycloid following along the handwritten line.

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