6 Jul
2005
6 Jul
'05
11:34 a.m.
How about just slurping the tape in, and playing with trivial
transformations (various code set --> ASCII) to see if any
intelligence pops up?
If you had recognizable sentences, for example, followed by bursts
of nonsense, likely that's end-of-line gunk. And so on.
I recognize it's likely to not be voluminous free prose like this
email, easy to detect. It might be very difficult to decode. It
seems unlikely (though possible) that a WP document was punched
onto tape; it is more likely to be a software patch, bootstrap,
diagnostic, diag or error dump, random utility, or
non-of-the-above.
Imbibe the hallucinogen of choice, and stare at the tape; you can
usually see binary-loader record patterns (often where they
actually exist). Human eyes & brain are VERY good at spotting
visual patterns. Once I get in sync with a tape I can usually spot
ITA2 cr, lf, nul etc sequences, it's not hard.
Slurp to disk, leader and trailer and all, would probably be a
good start.
On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Andrew K. Bressen wrote:
Sellam, if you are still working that Wang tape, and
think it had
something to do with a Flexo, check YahooGroups for the Fridenites
group; it's a Friden alums list. The inestimable Stan Kelly-Bootle
turned me on to it.
Flexos could be set up with pretty much any encoding desired
within the limit of the number of channels supported by the model.
Some of the custom hacks for various OEM's got pretty elaborate;
the EDSAC I Friden reportedly managed to encode double-case with 5
channels, an awful lot of state for a mechanical device to keep track of.
Does the tape in question have enough bits to be a document
of substantial size?
I find myself thinking about IBM's printer control paper tapes, and
wondering if what you have is not so much a document as the control
instructions for printing a certain document, or the numbers or
other info that were supposed to be merged into a document when printed...