punching paper tape

steven at malikoff.com steven at malikoff.com
Fri Mar 26 22:09:18 CDT 2021


Al said
> the best picture i have at hand of what a ww tape looks like is on the right of
> http://bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/whirlwind/X4222.2008_Whirlwind_ptp/pictures/start_of_sort_20180724/8.JPG
>
> you can see it is narrower by one punch than a normal 8-channel tape


OK that really seems to be 7/8" wide 7-level, even though the 1965 ECMA doc says 7-level is 1" ...??

So I just added a --whirlwind flag to ptap2dxf (and pushed it up) to make physical tape that looks
like that photo. It doesn't yet do any protocol mapping or whatnot as I don't quite get the gist of
the Whirlwind_Paper_Tape_Format.pdf

C:\path\to>ptap2dxf --whirlwind --text="012ABC" --output=WW.DXF
+--------+
| OO.    |
| OO.   O|
| OO.  O |
|O  .   O|
|O  .  O |
|O  .  OO|
+--------+
Joiner 0000: data byte 00000000  absolute position 00000006

C:\path\to>head -5 WW.DXF
  0
SECTION
  2
HEADER
  9
. . .

(And cut that tape DXF on a CNC stencil machine. I don't have my stencil cutter set up at this
moment so I just printed it on paper and measured to confirm 7/8" wide, 7 data holes)

But I suppose it's all a moot point if they don't have the original Whirlwind paper tape reader
device to run it through :(

Steve



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