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
@amoroso Nice mention of SNOBOL for text processing on page 10 :)
@arclight After all there wasn't much else for text processing back then.
@weekend_editor What kind of servers did your tool get the data from?
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).
@weekend_editor It made for a nice Joshua/Statice demo.
@amoroso That scan is really messed up — it looks like a ransom note!
