Recovering 86-DOS from Paper

GPT-5.4 was used for assistance in writing this article. More details to come later. Recovering 86-DOS From Paper A friend recently asked if I could help turn a stack of old tractor-related listings into text. That sounded like a straightforward OCR job until I learned what was actually on the paper: source code from a historic version of 86-DOS. At that point the task stopped feeling like routine digitisation and started feeling like software archaeology. The interesting part was not only that the listings were old, but that they had been produced by an old mechanical printer whose behaviour was still visible in every line. Modern OCR systems are happiest when text sits on a stable grid. These pages did not. Characters drifted slightly. Line spacing wandered. Margins were inconsistent.

…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Jscarsbrook.