9 May
2014
9 May
'14
5:29 p.m.
On May 9, 2014, at 6:07 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 05/09/2014 01:41 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
It seems to me that, while the sprocket holes are useful, they're not particularly
necessary for reading. One can sample each frame several times with a modern MCU as it
goes by and figure out pretty precisely where the center of the frame lies--and probably
the angle of the tape skew.
Not that I've ever had a need to try it...
You need the sprocket holes for byte framing. Yes, you could deal with irregular spacing
and skew easily enough, but you do need to be able to count the bytes, even if there are
no holes (bytes of zero).
paul
The tape
readers on these units are star wheel, and don't work well on tapes
that haven't been evenly punched. I've noticed DEC paper tapes sometimes have
this problem
That surprises me, as the DEC rader in the PC04/PC05 is also a
sprokect-feed unit. The sproket is quite larrge, but it would still give
problems with non-even spacing of the characters.