Wanted, Papertape Reader for Archiving Tapes

[Bill Degnan]

For those of you who have used Dunfield's PTR program and the OP-80A, what
PC did you use?  I am attempting with a Compaq 486.  I apparently have to
add resistors to some of the lines to control voltage from the normally
outbound parallel port.

I may switch to the SOL-20 and use that computer's parallel port instead.

I just want raw tape values, I can convert or do whatever with it, but
accuracy is the key for me.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.  I also brought home an Arduino from
the shop to see if I can get that to work.

Bill



On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 5:34 PM David Collins via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Further to Dave’s post below, I’m happy to share the Arduino code and
> schematic if anyone has a suitable reader and wants to try it. It was
> indeed designed to interface to the HP2748 but is pretty simple and could
> be adapted to any similar reader.
>
> David Collins
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On 29 Apr 2020, at 6:33 am, J. David Bryan via cctech <
> cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday, April 28, 2020 at 17:56, Tony Duell via cctech wrote:
> >
> >> The HP2748 is a common-ish example of this type of un[i]t.
> >
> > David Collins of the HP Computer Museum and I just recently completed
> > reading some 200+ paper tapes from the museum collection.  He used a
> 2748
> > coupled with a custom Arduino-based interface to produce plain-text
> files
> > containing an octal representation of the tape bytes.  We passed these
> > through a small program to convert them to binary files and a second
> > program to verify checksums of those tapes containing relocatable or
> > absolute binary object data.  The resulting files can be used as is with
> > the HP 2100 SIMH simulator or could be punched back into physical paper
> > tapes if desired.
> >
> >                                      -- Dave
> >
>