21 Jul
2002
21 Jul
'02
7:37 a.m.
I had a couple of Disk-A-Tape units from a CNC systems that were controlled by a
PDP-11/04s. They appear to have RS-232 I/O and a parallel port that emulates a paper tape
reader. I don't know if the parallel port handles input too so that data can be saved
to disk or if they output only. They have a 360k floppy drive in them and used it for
storage but looked like a paper tape reader to the rest of the system. There's a
calcualtor like display and keypad on the front that I'm guessing allows the operator
to select the block of data to be used. They look interesting and I've fired them up
and they appear to work but I have no idea how to connect or operate them so I gutted all
of them except one for parts.
Joe
At 09:07 AM 7/20/02 -0700, Sellam wrote:
On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Tony Duell wrote:
This reminds me (for no stringently particular reason) that I have an
interesting Anderson-Jacobsen ASR terminal that has a disk drive instead
of paper tape for storing the data stream.
This is only slightly more interesting than the TI Silent 700 Model 733's
I have that use digital cassette tapes.
http://siconic.com/computers/ASR733-1.jpg
I've actually played around with them quite a bit by way of a data
recovery job I did. Very neat machines. They store data in something
like 66 byte chunks. The tape drive actually advances in discrete steps
that you can observe. It writes start and end marks for each block, and
also has an ASCII search capability.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Still
plugging away of a TTL style cpu in a FPGA I have found some terminals
localy. How ever I am still looking for a serial RS232 mass storage device
in Canada that is not tacky looking like a old Pee-Cee. For now I am using a
There have been paper tape punches/readers, digital tape drives and even
disk drives with RS232 interfaces. But most of them didn't have any form
of block addressing -- they just saved data to replay it later. Would
that be any use? 