25 Aug
2005
25 Aug
'05
9:52 p.m.
On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Brad Parker wrote:
Remember punchcards?
Maybe.
Does anyone read them these days?
Occasionally.
I'm just curious if anyone does, and if they do,
how they do it.
I grew up with the Apple ][ so I went with what I know. I had a 6522 VIA
card I built in a college course years ago. So I managed to interface my
Documation M200 (200 cards per minute) to an Apple //e via the 6522 card.
I wrote a little driver application that reads an decodes the cards (based
on whatever character set I have loaded) and optinally sends the data
over a serial port to a waiting PC. I have a laptop running Procomm Plus
in logging mode.
The Apple //e reads the cards, decodes them, then transmits the entire
card over the serial port to the PC at 9600bps. This all happens fast
enough to keep up with the 200 CPM rate.
Someone approached me with some tapes to read and they
also had 2 boxes
of cards.
Let me know if you need assistance with this.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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