[Simh] Various

[Toby Thain]

On 2020-02-13 9:49 AM, Mark Emmer wrote:
> 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 was aware of the "pie" verb describing typesetters dropping made up
type... TIL it survived into the punch card era.

--Toby


> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> Get BlueMail for Android <http://www.bluemail.me/r?b=15774>
> On Feb 13, 2020, at 6:51 AM, Bob Supnik <bob at supnik.org
> <mailto: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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