28 Aug
2002
28 Aug
'02
4:08 p.m.
Ben Franchuk wrote:
What I would like to see a small micro processer board
with a flash memory and a serial port and a few switches.
This would be used to emulate a paper tape reader/punch
for things like bootstraps and other small programs like
FOCAL for the PDP-8 or other early computers that did
not boot from BASIC in rom.
This would be remarkably easy to do. And, in fact, could contain a
mechanism to read paper tape. Rather than using FLASH on a micro, I'd use
an MMC card, so that after I stored my 128MB of paper tape images, I could
switch out cards.
While time has been a constraint, I've been mentally designing a similar
concept device for Sinclair 1000s and ZX-81. A device with a 2 x 16 LCD, an
MMC card, and a micro that would allow saving and loading of programs to the
MMC instead of cassette tape. You'd be able to enter the filename on the
LCD, or perhaps use a TSR on the ZX81 to assign a program name prior to the
save. Then you could copy the MMC card on a Windows/Linux machine (DOS
format filesystem), and swap cards with your friends.
And with just a little software, I'm sure it could support Apples, PETs, IBM
PCs, and anything else that had a cassette port. Basically, you'd just need
to know the encoding standard, and as they say, "The rest is software".
--John