Wanted, Papertape Reader for Archiving Tapes

[davidkcollins2 at gmail.com]

I've pulled together details of the controller used with an HP2748 paper tape reader to dump a bunch of tapes from the HP Computer Museum's collection with the help of J. David Bryan.

The details are at this link..

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KaJkVgYzPusJN9tLf4IaSIa104fvLhUs

The unit and Arduino code are both pretty rough and ready and I'm sure can be improved - but they served their purpose!

Hope it is of use to others...  

Now to get those new tape files published...

David Collins
www.hpmuseum.net


-----Original Message-----
From: David Collins <davidkcollins2 at gmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, 29 April 2020 7:34 AM
To: J. David Bryan <jdbryan at acm.org>; General Discussion: On-Topic Posts <cctech at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: Wanted, Papertape Reader for Archiving Tapes

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
>