4 Dec
2006
4 Dec
'06
7:46 p.m.
Back in the Altair days, there was a company called
Oliver Audio Engineering
that made a small optical papertape reader for hobbyist use. You pulled the
tape through manually. The read strobe was generated by sensing the sprocket
holes. It would not be difficult to recreate this device, or something
similar.
I have the OAE-OP80A and it is very simple and quite reliable - in fact I've been
using it to recover paper tapes recently. I have photos and a scan of the manual
(with schematic) on my site, under the "Misc. Items" section near the bottom of
the main page.
Btw - I've just received the first shipment of the paper tapes I was promised,
including quite a few Cromemco, Dazzler and TDL titles - I will be reading them
over the next couple of weeks and will post the data streams to my site.
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