29 Jun
2003
29 Jun
'03
10 a.m.
Hi Pete! Just to introduce myself to the folks here;
I was an Acorn
Welcome aboard!
system programmer for several years which is how I
know Pete, and
I subbed to this list a couple of days ago - although my interest here
is actually in older stuff, I *do* have an absolute sh*tload of old
Acorn systems and boards that I've been trudging around for years
and I'll be glad to help with Acorn info when I can. Any of the
Acorn kit that I have which anyone needs, they're welcome to it -
I'll never use it again, I just wanted to save it from the dumper...
I have a couple of Acorn Systems (one 6502, the other 6809-based). I am
always looking for any of the more unusual I/O cards for them....
Anyway, yes, we have a significant collection of paper
tapes which
I used to use personally around '76-78, at which point they were
donated to the Royal Scottish Museum. Unfortunately the curators
Argh!
won't let us take them off the premises now in
order to read them,
so we need to take a reader of some description into their warehouse
along with a portable PC. Even a serial ASR33 would do, although
it would be a heavy lift! We're pretty desparate here...
I would recoemnd against using an ASR33 or any other sprocket-fed reader.
Too much risk of damaging the tapes....
Try to find a Trend USR or HSR, or some other capstan-fed reader with
optical sensing of all the holes including the sprocket track. Those
readers are remarkably kind to tapes, even if you get a snarl-up. They
are not _trivial_ to interface to a PC (the interface is one TTL level
signal per track, including the sprocket track, and signals to start the
tape moving, etc -- you need to add logic to get it to step one character
at a time if that's what you want to do -- but it _will_ stop on a
character), but it's not impossible to do that either.
The only problem is finding one. I have several of them, but (a) I'm in
London and (b) they're all linked to rather larger machines...
-tony