
Typewriter Cartography - Jureko
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2018/11/26/typewriter-cartography/
======
Theodores
I spent a lot of time making maps on a ZX81. This involved re-mapping the 64
characters in the character set that could be displayed to my own custom
characters in shadow RAM and editing the pixels of each character. This needed
an extraordinary amount of tracing paper, graph paper and effort. In those
days work had to be saved to cassette tape and any surge of electricity such
as turning on the kettle would result in all work lost.

The source of the maps was my school grade atlas, there was also a resource
limit on available characters so the end result could have half of Madagascar
looking suspiciously like the tip of India (since one of those 64 characters
would have to be used for both).

There was just the one TV in the house so everyone else had to put up with no
hot beverages or TV whilst I busied myself getting a monochrome 'artists
impression' of a map to show on the screen in the living room. There was no
commercial ambition involved, no notion of getting my completed code in a
magazine, no possibility of sharing my ZX81 maps with the wider world, not
least due to the non-standard memory mapping of my ZX81.

As a consequence of this formative childhood experience I truly appreciate
these typewriter maps, although I consider the use of online maps and these
Adobe products as tantamount to cheating.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81_character_set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81_character_set)

(Yep, there were only 64 characters, incredible.)

~~~
jacobush
Your shadow characters must have taken a huge amount of RAM, too. :-)

I have the 16kbyte expansion, very frivolous. Though gotten in modern times.
The only contact I had with the system was my uncle who used his ZX81 to heat
his home with the cheaper night tariff than the day rate. (Of electricity.)

------
pella
~ related: "telnet mapscii.me"

 _" MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world map renderer for your console - enter
=> telnet mapscii.me <= on Mac and Linux, connect with PuTTY on Windows"_

[https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii](https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii)

~~~
wl
As a reminder, Apple removed the telnet client from 10.13 in a frustrating
exercise of short-sighted security paternalism.

~~~
tptacek
It's so frustrating. No "gopher" either.

