Data conversion

Find a machine with a tapereader and an RS232 port.Read the tape in and download to a laptop or just read direct of the tape,slow but possible.

In article , Andrew Mawson writes

I know the problem, still have some old game programs on 5.25 discs which I forgot to move across. I think I still have an old 5.25 disc drive in a box, which could probably be fitted to a recent PC; let me know if you are stuck and you can have/borrow it.

David

parameters

packing

Thanks David, I'll bear it in mind

Are there such things as usb connected external drive boxes that would take a 5.25" ??

AWEM

I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to build yourself a tape reader - just need 8 optical sensors (plus one for the sprocket hole) and a microcontroller...and I'm only half joking ;-)

Regards, Tony

I worked on process control systems in the '70s that were programmed from paper tape - we kept the archives for each system in large cardboard archive file boxes in a quiet corner of the factory. Customer had a mishap with his master tapes and asked for a fresh set from the archive - unfortunately, their archive box & contents had been eaten by rats...

Regards, Tony

Why bother I have always assumed it would be happy on the std fd ribbon. But I may be wrong!!!!! Mind you the panels are always OFF the sides of my desktop. I also have a 5 1/4 drive should you need it. No borrows or swaps it is yours! Also a 1200 baud modem should you need it. I think I have some 5 1/4 floppies as well, for backup

Richard

Tony,

When I worked for Ferranti in process control we used miles of the stuff. I remember Mobil's Coryton refinery one night when a total reload was needed, the masters were in Coral 66 (or maybe Fortran) and had to be complied onto the hard disk. The (Borroughs) 2 Mb disk had 100 tracks and a head per track. I worked out we had loaded 14.2 miles of paper tape to generate the binary image on the disk, and that must have been less than 2mB - a long night. But those were the days when you could load a test program into core store in the office, and take it to site to run.

AWEM

Andrew -

That sounds very familiar...except that this was Kent Process Control & we wrote everything in PDP-8 and PDP-11 assembler. I seem to recall Ferranti was a major competitor. Generating a full set of listings & binaries was a very long process - two passes through each source tape, making sure they were all loaded in the right order...tedious in the extreme. You had hard disks?? Luxury!!

Regards, Tony

I can remember my dad bringing old punched tape back from Grumman to keep me amused in the early 1970s, paper tape was boring, the good stuff was mylar?, blue on one side, bright shiny on the other. More permanent I suspect and less palatable to small furry creatures.

programmed

permanent

I wrote a diddy program that printed out Christmassy messages in block text in holes in paper tape that we twisted and put up as streamers in the office.

AWEM

On or around Tue, 5 May 2009 13:40:39 +0100, "Andrew Mawson" enlightened us thusly:

XPOST to the shed, I bet someone has one. Though whether it'll be in jbexvat beqre is another matter.

I have a jbexing 5.25" drive what will read most disks as long as they don't have "weird" track/index/sector formatting.

If you're interested, there's a DOS program that'll let you read/ write/ format strange floppies. About the only things it won't do are format a disc written in a 1.2Meg drive to be readable in a 360K drive, or format/ write to a 3.25" HD floppy in a DD drive.

ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/diskutil/fdfrm18.zip

DOS only, unfortunately, but it'll fit on a 720K boot floppy with DOS 5.

The same function's built in to Penguin based machines, if you can jbex out how to do it.

I have a 5.25" floppy disk drive - whether it's still in jbexing beqre under the dust is another matter.

I had a stack of 5.25 disc drives somewhere, there must be loads about even now, and I goov they'll jbex off the same interface as the 3.5" drive which y'can still find on not-too-out-of-date motherboards.

Alternatively, I bet you culd hfr one of those USB 3.5" floppy drives, rip the drive out and plumb in a 5.25" one in its place. You'd need a separate PSU.

The paper tape is in some ways easier - a homebrew sheddy sort of reader could easily be molished using, say, a reel-to-reel tape transport and some photodiodes and LEDs, over a parallel port or one of them general-porpoise USB I/O wossnames from Maplin. Speed isn't gonna be an issue, you'll only need to read it once.

Nice wee project, that.

You could cheat and chase up one of the many "retro computing" type interest groups who'll have all the original hardware networked up for the hfr of.

I did that once, before microcontrollers were invented, but my arms were not long enough to pull more than a metre or so of tape through at a time!

Did your PDP-8 not have hard disks? Ours had a 32k (yes k) hard drive, head per track.

I did work on one PDP-8 system that had hard disks, but they were only used for data storage on that project - all of the software tools we had at the time were paper tabe based.

Regards, Tony

I did a year with paper tape only, developing a control system. It was hard work on paper tape, about 4-5 hours for an edit, assemble, load cycle. At least it was ASCII, not 5 hole stuff. DECtape was the way forward, just the right size for control system development in assembler, and sufficiently robust to survive at the customer's site. DEC were quite happy to extend our maintenance contract to cover site work, but no way would they countenance an RK05 on site.

Pity about the RX01 floppy, already smaller than DECtape, but they threw away 25% of what remained by writing 12 bits to two 8-bit bytes, and another 4% by not using track 0. We had to wait until 1977ish for RX02, for a DECtape sized floppy, by then the -8 was effectively dead.

Anyway, I liked the PDP-8 sufficient that I bought a secondhand DECtape system 1979ish for home/business use. Just fitted in the ingle nook by the fireplace.

Regards,

David P.