Chris Whitfield and Ian Young have interfaced the
borrowed optical
paper tape reader that we were kindly loaned and have it working on
a PC. Before we go to the site that has the paper tapes (several
dozens) does anyone have a winder we could borrow to save winding them
all back up by hand?
I have one, but it wouldn't be easy to lend it to you...
However they're not hard to make. The thing you wind the tape onto is a
cylindrical core about 1" in diameter with a disk (about 4-6" in
diameter) screwed on one side. A slot cut in the cylinder holds the end
of the tape. I would rotate it by hand (the handle and gears from a
hand-driven grinding wheel are _ideal_ for this -- in fact one of my
winders was converted from such a unit) -- motorising winding adds all
sorts of problems if you want to avoid snapping the tape.
Also before I write it (I have some paper documentation to work from
describing the Atlas Autocode character set, which is from the
Flexowriter printers that were attached to it) does anyone already have
any code to convert from the flexowriter char set to ascii in any form?
tr(1) ?
-tony