X BitMaps: extract image data and display in ascii terminal
Intro
While being distracted from my previous distractions from an earlier distraction (fonts), I was intrigued by: [Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile]
The report [a Summer Vacation: Digital Restoration and Typesetter Forensics] included a link to [archive made available of Martin W. Guy's backup to tape from the 80s], where the authors found some data they used either directly or to confirm their earlier guesses about construction of the document. This appears to have taken about 6-8 weeks of work to rebuild one printed report from various information they were able to find or still had in hand. But I digress.
Within the archive index was images described as: Mike Hawleys's collection of tiny X bitmaps (Dec 1988) Including: [Brian Kernighan].
Unknown image type
After clicking the extension-less file I saw:
#define bwk_width 48
#define bwk_height 48
static char bwk_bits[] = {
0x00, 0x00, 0xc0, 0x3f, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0xf8, 0xea, 0x01, 0x00, ...
Hoping to find information to help find an application that could show this source code, I saved it to disk and tried file: bwk.image.c_source: ASCII text. Seeing this is c source code, I assumed that this was used by directly compiling into a larger c application. What I could have done was attempt to identify the file with:
| test | result |
|---|---|
| ffprobe | bwk.image.c_source: Invalid data found when processing input |
| gimp | bwk.image.c_source' failed: Unknown file type |
| imageinfo | XBM X Windows system bitmap (black and white) 1850 8 48x48
using: imageinfo --format --fmtdscr --size --depth --geom bwk.image.c_source |
| imagemagick identify | XBM 48x48 48x48+0+0 8-bit sRGB 2c 1.85KB 0.000u 0:00.000 |