[Simh] Various

[Mark Emmer]

Any good simulation would have to include the semi-real I/O instructions RCC (Read and Chew Card) and DPD (Drop and Pie Deck).

I'm with you about never again struggling to remove a card from the read gate that had been converted to a mini-accordion or measuring the size of a progrram in boxes, not bytes.

I'm traveling for several weeks, but when back home I will assist Ken in getting an SDS driver for the reader/punch if he hasn't completed the task by then.  All needed documentation is in the 940 Reference Manual.

I wonder if anyone has sound recordings of a reader/punch?  That would be a nice addition to a blinkenlights implementation, which is on my To Do list.

Mark



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On Feb 13, 2020, 6:51 AM, at 6:51 AM, Bob Supnik <bob at supnik.org> wrote:
>1. I can confirm that RT11 V5.3 INIT does not work properly with an
>RL02 
>in 3.10.
>
>My next step is to trace back changes, because I think it used to work.
>
>2. There's no card reader for the SDS 940 because
>
>a) I hate card readers (from having used them way back when)
>b) I thought there wouldn't be any demand
>
>Rich Cornwell's library should make it easier to implement a card
>reader
>these days.
>
>My first card reader story goes back to an RCA Spectra 70 I used in
>1965.
>It had a vacuum pick reader for high speed operation. The reader would
>gradually curl the front edge of the cards, so that after two or three
>passes, the deck was unreadable. It's failure mode was to spit cards
>out,
>past the receive hopper, at very high velocity and scatter them ten or
>fifteen feet out on the floor...
>
>The second was a very slow mechanical reader on a PDP-7 in 1966. The
>only other keyboard device was a Teletype, so initial entry of programs
>was done from punched cards. It read, allegedly, 100 cards per minute
>using mechanical fingers with little star wheels on the end. DEC field
>service was in almost every week tuning or fixing the damned thing so
>that it could actually handle a decent-sized deck.
>
>In my experience, only IBM built decent card readers. The reader/punch
>on the 1620 (I used one in 1964) was very sturdy, and the 407 (used for
>offline printing of punched card output) could read almost anything.
>
>/Bob
>
>
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