There was a slight delay in PMN's departure _for Los Angeles. Delivery of the hardcopy camera had been marginally late and for this reason, III were too busy to 'accommodate' him before next week. PMN and RET were therefore travelling together on Saturday.
Answers to two queries had been sent from III. They confirmed that even when using the High Speed Page Print option; it was possible for the text to cross block boundaries. The software places a marker at the end of the block which causes the hardware to leave high speed mode at the end of the block. It is restarted by software for the next block.
In the new Set Intensity Command, bit 9 should be zero for black and white output. For colour output, if bit 9 is zero it is equivalent to bit 9 set to 1 and bits 9 to 11 of the next word set to zero (clear filter).
Training courses will almost certainly be during the week 17 to 21 March for both operators and programmers.
Coding for the initial SPOOL system is almost complete. This will allow output to be taken off for a particular camera. The format for a SYSTEM JOURNAL message has been defined and incorporated in GROATS, SPROGS and SMOG. This could be used to find out which jobs were in the SPOOL on a failure.
It was suggested that a news file called :FR80.NEWS be provided. This would give information as to when the SPOOL was last emptied and any other news of interest to the user.
FR80 vector output is now available from SMOG. This has been checked with the NUTS PRINT facility and the VIEW program on the PDP15. TEXT output for the Tektronix is nearly working. No work has been done on FR80 output from TEXT. The various camera limits have not yet been typed in. These can be obtained from SPROGS. PAD is working on the VECTOR family command.
Version III has been released. SPROGS is practically complete for the FR80. All that remains is the inclusion of the ID frame. All the SMOG routines are now working except for about six. There is still a need to decide what camera numbers should be defined for the FR80 (at a later meeting it was decided that all three SD4020 cameras would be changed to FR80; subsequently, two of these would be removed).
A version of SCFOR coded in SPROGS is running at about the same speed as the original SCFOR (but much larger). The SPROGS version has been recoded in terms of SMOG-like routines. Once SMOG is available, the SPROGS version should run using SMOG without change.
The utility to view FR80 output in the SPOOL using a Tektronix has been coded but is still to be tested.
This is working apart from the inclusion of the ID frame and a bug in the dissolve routine.
An initial version of the VIEW program has been made available on the PDP15, This does not yet handle text. It has proved immediately useful, finding bugs in GROATS, SPROGS and SMOG.
It looks as though the differences between the two assemblers are sufficiently great that a great deal of work will be involved.
Output to the Tektronix is nearly working. The character set on the 360/ 195 is different so that some characters have to be rearranged and others defined. It was found that the Level H compiler was unable unable to cope with a large number of subroutine calls in one routine.
Work has started on generating FR80 output.
Little work has been done on defining and implementing the SPOOL system. The HASP internal writer modifications have still not arrived. Some preliminary work is being done on outputting SD4020 instructions to HASP using FORTRAN WRITE statements.
This work is still waiting for a version of SMOG to be made available.
The new colour film processor seems to be working satisfactorily. The control valve for the III film processor has been found (having been lost at London Airport) and is now here.
