Paper tape and 8th bit?

Ah... - thanks. This makes perfect sense. The tape does not contain an input stream such as you would "type in" via an ASR-33, nor does it contain an internal representation of the BASIC program that you could load directly into memory - what it contains is a listing of the program as produced by the LIST command. That explains the high bit on the end of tokenized words, and also explains the null characters following newlines - these are TTY pads. Thinking about it, this makes further sense, as a likely way that these tapes were created is to LIST the program to an ASR-33 punch. I've gotten the OP-80A to work quite reliably - I have it mounted in a little bracket that hangs it off the edge of my desk so that I can unfold/refold the paper-tape in piles on the floor as I draw it through. The OP-80A instructions tell you to use a 40w or 60w bulb as the light source and to lower it until you get the right light level to read the holes in the tape. I'm using a "luxo lamp", and find that even a 40w bulb is too bright - I can't move the lamp high enough to keep it from seeing through the tape, so I am using a variac which gives me very good control over the intensity. With this setup I can adjust it to read very reliably and consistantly. I've written utilities to read tapes into binary files via the OP-80A connected to the parallel port, as well as to compare two files (ignoring the leader/trailer lenghts) and report on the exact differences (bytes missing) between them - I almost always get identical reads, and the data I am getting looks right. Regards, Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html