I suppose one could use a hex format, but I've never seen anything under CP/M other than binary. Normally it's loaded into memory and then saved to disk. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Cini, Richard <RCini(a)congressfinancial.com> To: 'ClassCompList' <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 1:49 PM Subject: Paper tape format paper

At 03:49 PM 5/25/00 -0400, you wrote: Well... for my $0.225 worth (inflation you know)... I doubt that there is a real answer for that one, unless you select a particular operating 'model' for focus on. By that I mean, that since neither the Altair or IMSAI had a resident monitor program or 'native' operating system at first, there were no hard and fast rules as to what/how you would load code... By way of example: Altair paper tapes were loaded by a keyed in bootstrap routine, which pulled a loader from the paper tape which read the MITS checksummed binary format. IMSAI's paper tapes early on had a keyed in loader, which read in a loader, which read Intel HEX format tapes. Motorola also had a variation on the Intel HEX format which TDL was fond of IIRC, and they produced tapes marketed into the Altair / IMSAI market. Throw CP/M into the mix, and the 'RDR/PUN' devices were raw binary unless they were selected by a loader program, although ASM and MAC could read/write Intel HEX I believe. (where IS that manual...???) Cromemco published their paper tape distributions in a mix of Intel HEX, binary, and Tokenized CROMEMCO BASIC. Processor Technology was largely Intel HEX I think... A lot of third party utility/game/'business' (and I use the phrase lightly) were straight ASCII dumps from Microsoft (sigh) BASIC... ... Tough question, eh? -jim --- jimw(a)computergarage.org The Computer Garage - http://www.computergarage.org Computer Garage Fax - (503) 646-0174