Silent700

Thanks. I thought so, too ;)

The printouts were old 9-pin dot matrix, and somewhat faded in parts. The OCR I had access to does very poorly with that sort of type. There is an effort underway to transcribe all of the posts into an interactive web format. Someday!

Yeah, it looks like Firefox is the only browser where they don't work.

We've had all of the last five at the show before. Older than that is "Antique."

Here's a gallery (and video) of previous shows that may give some more insight into what goes on at a VCF:

http://vcfmw.org/past.html

Absolutely heavy on the hardware. Lots of micros, obviously, but there are always a few minis (PDP-8/PDP-11/HP 1000/etc), Unix workstations and odd stuff. This year there is even an IBM Midrange display (System/34, /36, AS/400).

Appropriate vendors are welcome and loads of stuff changes hands.

That was a decent show. Great place to find AT cases, SIMMs and imported knock-off Sound Blasters in identical blue/orange boxes.

Good Lord, that website rules.

;)

You're the 8BBS first user to speak up. Any stories?

I attempted OCR with Acrobat, which you can inspect by downloading the PDF. Then archive.org does their own OCR (I believe with ABBY?) which is what you'll see if you look at their .txt version. I haven't had a chance to compare them yet.

I wouldn't expect much from OCRing dot matrix, though I'd be happy for others with access to other engines to give it a try.

Someday I'd like to get all the messages into a browsable form on a website. Hell, we can crowd-source transcription if we have to.