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Could well be, to a 14 year old it was fascinating, I lived in the computer room. But my father was a math teacher there so he was never far away. I went on to learn half a dozen languages and never did much with BASIC after that..I tutored it, but the bigger the program got the slower it got, it was the garbage collection I think. I still keep a copy of gwbasic around but don't actually use it.
Now I've got hundreds of Popular and Radio Electronics PDF files to look at. I can lift out front pages as jpegs, what I think I want to do is make images that each show a year's worth of front covers and offer them back to where the PDFs are. Looking at the front covers gives sort of a newstand view, the major acticles are mentioned on the front. Most are about stuff that's obsolete but I ran across lots of articles about how to make printed circuit boards for instance. I've made a few but I mosty wire on Vectorboard type stuff, which is OK but slow. So I'm thinking of ways to check for missing images and lay them out in the right order programatically. And still downloading PDFs, the last years of Popular Electronics where it was sold and changed names a bunch. I've renamed some but all have year and month like yyyy-mm in the titles which shoudl keep them sorted correctly. Looking at blah-1967-*.jpg should get me 12 images for a year. And I can count to be sure I have 12 or kick out an error message and skip them.
If I put together 4 colums of pages by 3 rows I end up with squares about 2500x2500 pixels, which is mostly still legible if you resize it to 1000x1000. It's like frame buffer graphics, you allocate a bunch of memory (3 * width * height) then for a given pixel location in it you write to an offset that's (width * y * 3) + (x * 3) for 24 bit color. Then you call a jpeg or png library to write your buffer out to a file. And the origin is in the upper left so you have to flip everything upside down. The same library will decompress the files into memory to copy out of. I've done this stuff before but not on quite this scale. Get all the details worked out first, think about the hard parts, and all the pieces fall together.
Now I've got hundreds of Popular and Radio Electronics PDF files to look at. I can lift out front pages as jpegs, what I think I want to do is make images that each show a year's worth of front covers and offer them back to where the PDFs are. Looking at the front covers gives sort of a newstand view, the major acticles are mentioned on the front. Most are about stuff that's obsolete but I ran across lots of articles about how to make printed circuit boards for instance. I've made a few but I mosty wire on Vectorboard type stuff, which is OK but slow. So I'm thinking of ways to check for missing images and lay them out in the right order programatically. And still downloading PDFs, the last years of Popular Electronics where it was sold and changed names a bunch. I've renamed some but all have year and month like yyyy-mm in the titles which shoudl keep them sorted correctly. Looking at blah-1967-*.jpg should get me 12 images for a year. And I can count to be sure I have 12 or kick out an error message and skip them.
If I put together 4 colums of pages by 3 rows I end up with squares about 2500x2500 pixels, which is mostly still legible if you resize it to 1000x1000. It's like frame buffer graphics, you allocate a bunch of memory (3 * width * height) then for a given pixel location in it you write to an offset that's (width * y * 3) + (x * 3) for 24 bit color. Then you call a jpeg or png library to write your buffer out to a file. And the origin is in the upper left so you have to flip everything upside down. The same library will decompress the files into memory to copy out of. I've done this stuff before but not on quite this scale. Get all the details worked out first, think about the hard parts, and all the pieces fall together.
