Subject: Re: Reading PDP-8 paper tapes

From: Graham Toal <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun Jun 29 18:37:28 2003

> A long-time acquaintance of mine (Graham Toal, whom some of you may
> know) has access to a collection of PDP-8 paper tape which wants
> reading.  Unfortunately some of it is in the care of the Royal Musuem
> in Edinburgh, who won't let it out of their sight.

> Does anyone -- preferably in the UK -- have a paper tape reader that
> could be hooked up to a modern machine (eg a laptop) to read the tapes
> in the museum, and which they'd be willing to lend?

> To see what Graham and friends are doing, take a look at
> http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/   It's worth a look even if you're not
> interested in Edinburgh.

> I know Graham reads the list, so replies here or to me are fine.

Hi Pete!  Just to introduce myself to the folks here; I was an Acorn
system programmer for several years which is how I know Pete, and 
I subbed to this list a couple of days ago - although my interest here
is actually in older stuff, I *do* have an absolute sh*tload of old
Acorn systems and boards that I've been trudging around for years
and I'll be glad to help with Acorn info when I can.  Any of the
Acorn kit that I have which anyone needs, they're welcome to it -
I'll never use it again, I just wanted to save it from the dumper...

(for example I have lots of those 32K system/atom memory cards that
y'all were talking about earlier.  In fact I have one of the System (4?)
file servers sitting on our washing machine right now that I've been
meaning to run up as soon as I can find my 110-240v transformer again!;
I've restored several hundreds of my acorn 3.5" disks but am only
very slowly restoring my 5" disks via a raw-read program that's
a pain in the arse to use; I think that job will go faster when
I get a real beeb set up with a serial line to my unix - again, the
bottleneck is a transformer.  I have one somewhere but it's mislaid!
Oh - that, and no monitor :-) )

Anyway, yes, we have a significant collection of paper tapes which
I used to use personally around '76-78, at which point they were
donated to the Royal Scottish Museum.  Unfortunately the curators
won't let us take them off the premises now in order to read them,
so we need to take a reader of some description into their warehouse
along with a portable PC.  Even a serial ASR33 would do, although
it would be a heavy lift!  We're pretty desparate here...

We also have some older paper tapes in the care of the University
computing service which *may* have things like the KDF9 Atlas Autocode
compiler on them which we also would like to read, but the PDP8
stuff is the current priority.

One of our volunteers, Chris Whitfield, went to visit Hans Pufal
last year and recovered data from some PDP9 DECtapes, including
the full source of Hamish Dewar's operating system for the PDP9/15.

Incidental to that - you may be interested in this file:

http://www.gtoal.com/grenoble/source3/8tran.000

Which is the source of the utility whose manual is here:

http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/dec/pdp15/DEC-15-ENZA-D_8TRAN.pdf

There's other related stuff in that same directory such as the
source to PIP.  We hope to return to Grenoble some time and read
some more of those tapes.  One of the tapes *MAY* be the mythical
PDP7 "Decsys" OS.  At least that's what's pencilled on the tape,
and the university did own a 7 for CAD work...

We have an RL01?? (maybe an RK05?) disk pack from the Wavepower
Project's PDP11 which we think may contain "GUTS" - Groeningen
University Timesharing System - an EMAS-like personal OS written
by Harry Whitfield and his students in Groeningen.  We're looking
for someone in the UK who may be able to read it.  The disk format
is the same as RSX11 we think, but we'd be happy even for
a sector by sector raw copy.

We've restored the sources of several operating systems:

EMAS - on ICL2900 and IBM/XA
PDP9/15 operating system by Hamish Dewar
68000 O/S by Fred King
Mouses for the Interdata/Perkin Elmer range by Peter Robertson and Chris
  Whitfield

This is all currently visible on the net but hasn't yet been
organised into a web site.  I'll be working on the web site
over the coming weeks; it'll appear one day at the URL which
Pete mentioned above.
(WIP is at http://www.gtoal.com/athome/edinburgh/ )

I recognise a few of the names here.  To the rest of you - nice to
meet you.  I hope to stick around, although I'm reading this via
the daily digest so won't be posting as frequently as most of you
guys.

regards

Graham

---

From: [email-masked] (Tony Duell)
Date: Sun Jun 29 18:47:23 2003

> Hi Pete!  Just to introduce myself to the folks here; I was an Acorn

Welcome aboard!

> I'll never use it again, I just wanted to save it from the dumper...

I have a couple of Acorn Systems (one 6502, the other 6809-based). I am 
always looking for any of the more unusual I/O cards for them....

> donated to the Royal Scottish Museum.  Unfortunately the curators

Argh!

> it would be a heavy lift!  We're pretty desparate here...

I would recoemnd against using an ASR33 or any other sprocket-fed reader. 
Too much risk of damaging the tapes....

Try to find a Trend USR or HSR, or some other capstan-fed reader with 
optical sensing of all the holes including the sprocket track. Those 
readers are remarkably kind to tapes, even if you get a snarl-up. They 
are not _trivial_ to interface to a PC (the interface is one TTL level 
signal per track, including the sprocket track, and signals to start the 
tape moving, etc -- you need to add logic to get it to step one character 
at a time if that's what you want to do -- but it _will_ stop on a 
character), but it's not impossible to do that either. 

The only problem is finding one. I have several of them, but (a) I'm in 
London and (b) they're all linked to rather larger machines...

-tony