15 Jan
2020
15 Jan
'20
9:32 a.m.
Papertape reader?
The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-bui…
You can proably buy one from the con https://cyphercon.com/, or the makers
http://www.tymkrs.com/ or ebay...
-Brian
15 Jan
15 Jan
10:01 a.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs
Brian Walden writes:
That's cool, but I'm worried about the fragility of the tape after all this
time.
Maybe because I got my start in the early networking era when I had to transfer
files from one machine to another by feeding the paper tape from the punch in one
ASR-33 into the reader of another :-)
Papertape
reader?
The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-bui…
You can proably buy one from the con https://cyphercon.com/, or the makers
http://www.tymkrs.com/ or ebay...
-Brian 
12:17 p.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs
Brian Walden wrote:
I'd be all over this if there also were a way to punch tapes.
Papertape
reader?
The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-bui… 
12:34 p.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs
Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/. You could
use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan the tape into files
and process digitally ?)
Earl
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 15, 2020, at 1:18 AM, Lars Brinkhoff
<lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
Brian Walden wrote:
I'd be all over this if there also were a way to punch tapes.
Papertape
reader?
The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-bui…
1:10 p.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]
Earl Baugh writes:
Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/.
You could use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan
the tape into files and process digitally ?)
Earl
I thought that I said earlier that I had a paper tape reader here but don't
remember much about it or if it ever worked. If I didn't have a huge project
list and it wasn't ski season I could hook it up to a pi. More likely that
I'll get to a computer museum sooner.
Just to keep this UNIX-related so that Warren doesn't get cranky, I believe
that this reader came out of some sort of experimental telephone exchange
in our group that was decommissioned. Dave Weller was very supportive of my
interests and somehow arranged for me to take much of it home as surplus
equipment. Kept me in 7400-series parts and Augat wire-wrap boards for a
long time. While there was no way that I could have kept the thing, I wish
that I had the magnetic drum memory because it was so cool from an industrial
art perspective.
Heinz may remember more about this than I do because he actually worked on
this project, but our department developed what I believe was the first
all-digital telephone exchange that used digital filtering (Hal Alles and
Jim Kaiser were in the group). I think that it had a pair of PDP-11/10s
in it, and a bigger PDP-11 as a supervisory machine that ran UNIX. I have
vague memories of Heinz and Carl poring over huge C program listings. I
also remember that there was a bug in the long-distance code where it wasn't
sending out the ST tone that ended up taking all of the key pulse senders in
the Berkeley Heights telephone exchange that provided the trunk line to our
lab off line as they didn't have timeouts and needed to be manually reset.
But hey, we were the phone company too so what could they do about it?
Oh, I think that the PDP-11/10s were used because we tried to use LSI-11s
but those turned out to be useless because of the way that DEC did the DRAM
refresh; it wasn't interleaved, they just stopped everything every so many
ms and refreshed everything. Non-starter for real-time systems.
And another thought, this machine may have been why Heinz wrote MERT.
I was gone before this system was completed so I have no idea how it fared
and how many of the ideas were incorporated into production systems. Oh,
yeah, I think that it was called the SS1 for Slave Switch 1.
Jon
2:05 p.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]
I thought the concern was about the fragility of the tape and the concern about running it
thru a period reader. I was just thinking these two options would be safer on the tape.
That’s why I was suggesting them. Just trying to be helpful .. all to familiar with the
long project list :-)
Earl
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 15, 2020, at 2:12 AM, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
Earl Baugh writes:
Why not build a variation of this with an
Arduino?
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/.
You could use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan
the tape into files and process digitally ?)
Earl
I thought that I said earlier that I had a paper tape reader here but don't
remember much about it or if it ever worked. If I didn't have a huge project
list and it wasn't ski season I could hook it up to a pi. More likely that
I'll get to a computer museum sooner.
Just to keep this UNIX-related so that Warren doesn't get cranky, I believe
that this reader came out of some sort of experimental telephone exchange
in our group that was decommissioned. Dave Weller was very supportive of my
interests and somehow arranged for me to take much of it home as surplus
equipment. Kept me in 7400-series parts and Augat wire-wrap boards for a
long time. While there was no way that I could have kept the thing, I wish
that I had the magnetic drum memory because it was so cool from an industrial
art perspective.
Heinz may remember more about this than I do because he actually worked on
this project, but our department developed what I believe was the first
all-digital telephone exchange that used digital filtering (Hal Alles and
Jim Kaiser were in the group). I think that it had a pair of PDP-11/10s
in it, and a bigger PDP-11 as a supervisory machine that ran UNIX. I have
vague memories of Heinz and Carl poring over huge C program listings. I
also remember that there was a bug in the long-distance code where it wasn't
sending out the ST tone that ended up taking all of the key pulse senders in
the Berkeley Heights telephone exchange that provided the trunk line to our
lab off line as they didn't have timeouts and needed to be manually reset.
But hey, we were the phone company too so what could they do about it?
Oh, I think that the PDP-11/10s were used because we tried to use LSI-11s
but those turned out to be useless because of the way that DEC did the DRAM
refresh; it wasn't interleaved, they just stopped everything every so many
ms and refreshed everything. Non-starter for real-time systems.
And another thought, this machine may have been why Heinz wrote MERT.
I was gone before this system was completed so I have no idea how it fared
and how many of the ideas were incorporated into production systems. Oh,
yeah, I think that it was called the SS1 for Slave Switch 1.
Jon 
8:50 p.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]
On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 2:12 AM Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
we tried to use LSI-11s
but those turned out to be useless because of the way that DEC did the DRAM
refresh; it wasn't interleaved, they just stopped everything every so many
ms and refreshed everything. Non-starter for real-time systems.
Be careful as to who you denigrate, my friend. 😂
Very interesting history, IMO. Yes, DEC sold the LSI-11, but Western
Digital designed it. DEC (KO specifically) had just put Ray Ball and Ken
O'humundro's CalData out of business for cloning the PDP-11/45 with a
Unibus on his Caldata 500
<http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/calData/CalData_Brochures_1974.pdf>. At the
time, WD had developed and started to sell to the systems manufacturers a
new set of bit-slice chips the MCP-1600
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCP-1600>, to compete with AMD's 2900 and
Intel 3000 series (plus they were already a chip supplier to DEC for UARTS).
So WD designs and builds a few LSI-11 as a sales demo of what you could
do with their new bit-slice chip (*i.e. *as those things often go, the
board, bus, and memory was a quick and cheap hack).
It's important to note that the way DEC nailed CalData was the *same
instruction set on the same bus*, WD did their own bus for their demo.
Also, please remember that at the time, WD was in the chip business. KO's
reaction this time was different. Instead of suing, DEC got the design and
started to build and sell them. WD took the board design, wrote a new set
of microcode based on the USCD Pascal-P machine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal>, then sold that as a 'system'
called the Pascal MicroEngine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_MicroEngine>, but primarily used it
is the sales demo.
I remember seeing one of the WD Pascal-P systems once when we were at Tek
(along with my favorite named workstation, the Modula based Lilith
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)>). But I do not think the
Pascal-P (nor Lilith) was very successful. Also, AMD ultimately won the
bit-slice chip business, as most designers at manufacturers like DEC,
Masscomp, FPS, *et al*. designed their new systems or at least the FP/AP
coprocessors with the 2900 series.
BTW: this is also why a few years later when Ken O'Humundro created another
full computer board with a 68000 on it with his new Able Computer Corp, he
put it on the QBUS which DEC could not lock up because they did not create
it as WD had.
16 Jan
16 Jan
5:40 a.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]
On 1/15/20 6:50 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
WD took the board design, wrote a
new set of microcode based on the USCD Pascal-P machine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal>, then sold that as a
'system' called the Pascal MicroEngine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_MicroEngine>, but primarily used it is the
sales demo.
And Volition Systems, took the P-System chip set and put it on the QBus, later put
Modula-2 on it.
15 Jan
15 Jan
6:29 p.m.
New subject: Spacewar at Bell Labs
At 12:34 AM 1/15/2020, Earl Baugh wrote:
Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
<https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/>https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/.
You could use cardboard rather than wood if itâs just a one time job. ( or scan the tape
into files and process digitally ?)
We're so close, I wish someone would figure out a way to let
a contemporary office scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap to
handle paper tapes. Reliable feed mechanism, nice scanner,
just needs a little software and maybe a guide. And a way
to re-spool the tape. Darn, just got complicated.
Same thing for a new way to read a magtape. You'd think it
could be done with a universal read head and some software.
Nine years ago I visited <http://www.comco-inc.com/>http://www.comco-inc.com/ ,
perhaps
one of the last sellers and refurbishers of 9-tracks. I dropped
off three 9-tracks I didn't need. He seems to be surviving
because oil survey companies still call and are willing to
write five-figure checks for particular working hardware.
- John
16 Jan
16 Jan
6:17 a.m.
New subject: tape reading (was Re: Spacewar at Bell Labs)
On 1/15/20 4:29 AM, John Foust wrote:
Same thing for a new way to read a magtape.
You'd think it
could be done with a universal read head and some software.
It's been done. You need a good transport that has enough torque to deal with
sticky tapes and a digitizer with about 100gigs of ram if you're doing acquisition
with a Saleae Logic16 USB3 analyzer.
https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape
The setup is a couple thousand dollars.
1802
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1803
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10 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
Al Kossow -
Bakul Shah -
Brian Walden -
Clem Cole -
Earl Baugh -
John Foust -
Jon Steinhart -
Lars Brinkhoff