Teletype or Facit 4070

Eek! What do you have in mind? I can't help you with sourcing either, but as I cut my programming teeth on PDP-8s with TTY and Facit raders/punches, I am fascinated to know what you are doing with it.

Regards, Tony

I've got a reader, but the punch was one of the casualties of the 2007 floods :(

A wave of nostalgia, as I spent years programming pdp11, some of which ad teletype interfaces. Some of the old dec dealers may be a ble to help: Swan Computers used to have a warehouse full of teletypes, paper tape punches and readers, as well as computers:

Another company is Scottish Data Systems, who used to have a wide variety of such kit, thugh I haven't dealt with either in 15 years or so.

One thing to note is that the british creed 7b style teleprinters punch

5 unit baudot code, while the us teletypes (asr33 etc) use standard ascii, which is more likely what machine tools would use. Worth checking before diving in though. A teletype is probably the best bet, as you can punch tape from the keyboard, whereas a standalone punch may need a current loop interface to enable connection to a pc.

If you need any help or more info on this, get in touch via group...

Regards,

Chris

Thanks Chris for that link,

I've been given a mainly working 4070 by a kind reader which I expect to be able to fix (one channel not punching).

At one time in a moment of rashness in the early 1980's I bought (sight unseen) the entire off site network equipment of Hoare & Co Govett (became Datastream), who were stock brokers in the city who started selling financial information to other brokers via their private network. Turned out that amongst the many terminals, drum plotters and matrix printers there were over 100 teletypes, and 80 brand new teletype stands. All the teletypes had non standard print heads - I became Data Dynamics biggest customer for replacements heads at one time!!! They are all long gone now - sold in small display adverts on the back of Practical Wireless long before people had pcs at home!

AWEM

Andrew,

I remember being out of regular work for almost 2 years during the early nineties recession. No ebay then, just micromart to buy and sell computer parts. The company I previousy worked for (Crosfield) gave me half a van load of dec and other kit and that and other stuff kept me afloat until I found more work. Much easier now, but methinks it will be tough all over europe for quite a few years to come. At least, interest rates are low, which helps mortgage payers a little.

I found the 4070 service manual on bitsavers.org:

Looking at the second page schematic, the solenoids are transistor driven, but have a fuse per solenoid, so the first thing to check would be the fuses. If the fuse has blown, then the driver transistor may be shorted, which should be easy to fix. I would give it a good clean out before doing any work with it and make sure the punch lube instructions are followed. That older kit was built like a brick outhouse and should last forever with a bit of maintenance.

The input side looks straight parallel, probably ttl compatable, so you should be able to drive that from a pc printer port with a suitable cable. The only thing then is to format the data from a data file. It should be quite easy to write a short C program to take care of that, calling bios routines, running msdos, rather than windows, to keep it simple...

Regards,

Chris

Thanks Chris. That pretty well fits in with my expectations at the time

- I told the FD that I thought cheap desktop equipment would in a very few years render the Mamba and other products unnecessary, but he told me I was wrong....

Du Pont are largely a chemicals and specialty products maker; the move into imaging seems to have been driven by one particular senior officer, and was something of a bad move financially.

David