[Simh] Various

[Ken Hall]

I don't recall it ever working, and I've fooled with it on and off for over 10 years.

Be nice to find out why it doesn't after all this time though.  Haven't had a chance to try the last few suggestions.


-----Original Message-----
From: Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com> On Behalf Of Bob Supnik
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2020 7:51 AM
To: simh at trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Various

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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