I had heard that the image came out when there was an error. I suspect that may be an urban-legendish retelling of the system you describe. Especially considering that the amount of work expended in printing an image probably exceeded that of the compiler + program being run. Nonetheless, I have remembered this story (I heard it in 1972) and I have a 2 color (b&w) image of A.E. that I made and sometimes put him up on the LCD I'm writing a driver for. Considered having him appear after an error but never could quite find a good excuse for it. Thanks for the refresh. On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Carl Denk wrote: > > Meanwhile, the governments of Earth followed the principles laid down b= y > > Alfred E. Neuman. > > Early 1960's, University of Michigan, high level programing language was > MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), similar to Fortran. Alfred's picture > was on the manual front cover. Machines were IBM 650 (vacuum tubes) > > 709 > 7090 (Transistor). There was a punch card deck to print out on the > noisy line printer Alfred's image. :) > > --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .