Reading PDP-8 paper tapes

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