18 Jul
2014
18 Jul
'14
noon
On 07/18/2014 02:27 AM, Philip Belben wrote:
When the IMSAI (or whatever machine) reads these tapes
in to run them in
BASIC,
Does it need to see two characters there?
Do they have to be DEL?
I thought that I was pretty clear about that--DEL, AFAIK, is the only
character *by definition* is supposed to be ignored--and that goes all
the way back to ECMA-1 (1963) when 6-bit codes were used by data
processing equipment (FWIW, ESCape was defined as 62 decimal/76 octal,
but that was later changed).
Does the IMSAI expect the DELs? I doubt it, since they convey no
information and DELs can appear anywhere in the data stream. If you're
using something other than an ASR33 (e.g., a "glass TTY") in
half-duplex, I doubt that they're necessary.
What's actually done is another matter, since the IMSAI is a hobbyist
computer and very often, standards were not observed in such software.
--Chuck